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ALTEMUS* YOUNG PEOPLE'S LIBRARY 



A CHILD'S 

History of England 

BY 

CHARLES DICKENS 

Arranged for Young Readers 

9 1W 



With Eighty Illustrations 



PHILADELPHIA 

HENRY ALTEMUS 



,U5 



nn 



IN UNIFORM STYLE 



Copiously Illustrated 

the pilgrim's progress 

Alice's adventures in wonderland 

through the looking-glass & what alice found there 

robinson crusoe 

the child's story of the bible 

the child's life of christ 

lives of the presidents of the united states 

the swiss family robinson 

THE FABLES OF jESOP 

christopher columbus and the discovery of america 

mother goose's rhymes, jingles and tales 

exploration and adventure in the frozen seas 

the story of discovery and exploration in africa 

gulliver's travels 

arabian nights' entertainments 

wood's natural history 

a child's history of england, by charles dickens 

BLACK BEAUTY, by ANNA SEWELL 



Price 50 Cents Each 



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TM USfcAft Y I 
QrCOVGftESSl 

WA1HINGTOH 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Ancient England and the Romans, ... 7 

II. England Under the Early Saxons, ... 18 

III. The Good Saxon, Alfred, 23 

IV. Athelstan and the Six Boy-Kings, ... 28 
V. Canute, the Dane, 36 

VI. Harold Harefoot, Hardicanute, and Edward 

the Confessor, 39 

VII. William the Conqueror, 43 

VIII. William II., 55 

IX. Henry I , 61 

X. Matilda and Stephen, ...... 67 

XI. Henry II., 73 

XII. Kichard I., 79 

XIII. King John, 82 

XIV. Henry III., 86 

XV. Edward I., 90 

XVI. Edward II., 94 

XVII. Edward III., . .... . . .98 

XVIII. Richard II., . . . • .103 

(v) 



VI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XIX. Henry IV., 106 

XX. Henry V., 110 

XXI. Henry VI., 114 

XXII. Edward IV., 119 

XXIII. Edward V., 126 

XXIV. Eichard III., 127 

XXV. Henry VII., 130 

XXVI. Henry VIII., 134 

XXVII. Edward VI., 160 

XXVIII. Mary, 162 

XXIX. Elizabeth, 166 

XXX. James I., 174 

XXXI. Charles I., 180 

XXXII. Oliver Cromwell, 186 

XXXIII. Charles II., 195 

XXXIV. James II., 207 

XXXV. Conclusion, 226 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 




Stonehenge. 
CHAPTER I. 

ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE ROMANS. 

You will see on the map of the world, in the left-hand 
upper corner of the Eastern Hemisphere, two islands lying 
in the sea. They are England and Scotland, and Ireland. 
England and Scotland form the greater part of these 
islands. Ireland is next in size. The little islands look- 

(7) 



8 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ing like dots are chiefly bits of Scotland, broken off, in the 
course of time, by the power of the restless water. 

In the old days, long ago, the sea roared round them 
just as it roars now. But the sea was not alive then with 
great ships sailing to and from all parts of the world. The 
winds and waves brought no adventurers to the islands, 
and the savage islanders knew nothing of the rest of the 
world, and the rest of the world knew nothing of them. 

It is supposed that the Phoenicians came in ships to 
these islands, and found that they produced tin and lead 
— both very useful tilings, produced upon the sea-coast. 
The most celebrated tin-mines in Cornwall are still close 
to the sea. One of them is hollowed out underneath the 
ocean, and the miners say that in stormy weather they can 
hear the noise of the waves thundering above their-heads. 

The Phoenicians traded with the islanders for these 
metals, and gave other things in exchange. The islanders 
were poor savages, going almost naked, or dressed in the 
rough skins of beasts. But the Phoenicians, sailing over 
to the opposite coasts of France and Belgium, and saying 
to the people there, u We have been to those white cliffs 
across the water, which you can see in fine weather, and 
from that country, which is called Britain, we bring this 
tin and lead," tempted some of the French and Belgians 
to come over also. These people settled themselves on the 
south coast of England, which is now called Kent, and, 
although they were a rough people, too, they taught the 
savage Britons some useful arts, and improved that part 
of the islands. It is probable that other people came over 
from Spain to Ireland and settled there. Thus strangers 
became mixed with the islanders, and the savage Britons 
grew into a wild, bold people— almost savage still, but 
hardy, brave and strong. 

The whole country was covered with forests and swamps. 
The greater part of it was misty and cold. There were no 
roads, bridges, streets nor houses. A town was only a 



ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE ROMANS. 9 

collection of straw-covered huts, hidden in a thick wood, 
with a ditch all round and a low wall made of mud, or the 
trunks of trees placed one upon another. The people 
planted little or no corn, but lived upon the flesh of their 
flocks and cattle. They made no coins, but used metal 
rings for money. They were clever in basket-work, and 
they could make a coarse kind of cloth and some very bad 
earthenware. But in building fortresses they were clever. 

They made boats of basket-work, covered with the skins 
of animals, but seldom ventured far from the shore. They 
made swords of copper mixed with tin, but they were so 
soft that a heavy blow would bend one. They made light 
shields, short, pointed daggers, and spears which they 
jerked back, after they had thrown them at an enemy, by 
a long strip of leather fastened to the stem. The butt-end 
was a rattle, to frighten an enemy's horse. The ancient 
Britons, being divided into as many as thirty or forty 
tribes, each commanded by its own little king, were con- 
stantly fighting with one another, and they always fought 
with these weapons. 

They were very fond of horses. The standard of Kent 
was the picture of a white horse. They could break and 
manage them well. Indeed, the horses, though they were 
rather small, were so well taught in those days that they 
can scarcely be said to have improved since, though the 
men are so much wiser. They obeyed every command, 
and would stand still, in all the din and noise of battle, 
while their masters went to fight on foot. The Britons 
could not have succeeded in their most remarkable art 
without the aid of these sensible animals. The art I mean 
is the construction and management of war-chariots, for 
which they have ever been celebrated in history. Each of 
the best sort of these chariots, not quite breast-high in 
front and open at the back, contained one man to drive 
and two or three others to fight — all standing up. The 
horses who drew them were so well trained that they 



1 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

would tear at full gallop over the stony ways and through 
the woods, dashing their enemies beneath their hoofs, and 
cutting them to pieces with the blades of swords or scythes 
fastened to the wheels, and stretched out beyond the car 
on each side for that cruel purpose. In a moment, while 
at full speed, the horses would stop at the driver's com- 
mand. The men would leap out, deal blows about them 
with their swords, leap on the horses, on the pole, spring 
back into the chariots anyhow, and as soon as they were 
safe the horses tore away again. 

The Britons had a strange religion, called the religion 
of the Druids. It seems to have been brought over, in 
early times, from the opposite country of France, and to 
have mixed up the worship of the Serpent and of the Sun 
and Moon with the worship of some of the heathen gods 
and goddesses. Its ceremonies were kept secret by the 
priests (the Druids), who pretended to be enchanters. 
Their ceremonies included the sacrifice of human victims, 
the torture of suspected criminals, and on occasions the 
burning alive, in immense wicker-cages, of a number of 
men and animals together. The Druid priests had great 
veneration for the oak. They met in dark woods, called 
sacred groves, and there they instructed in their myste- 
rious arts young men who came to them as pupils. 

These Druids built great altars open to the sky, frag- 
ments of some of which yet remain. Stonehenge is the 
most extraordinary of these. Three curious stones in Kent 
form another. We know, from examination of the great 
blocks, that they could not have been raised without the 
aid of some ingenious machines which are common now, 
but which the ancient Britons certainly did not use. I 
should not wonder if the Druids kept the people out of 
sight while they made these buildings, and then pretended 
that they built them by magic. 

Such was the condition of the Britons fifty-five years 
before the birth of our Saviour, when the Romans under 



ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE ROMANS. 



11 



Julius Caesar, were masters of all the rest of the world. 
Caesar had just conquered Gaul, and hearing there a good 
deal about the opposite island with the white cliffs, and 
about the bravery of the Britons who inhabited it, he re- 
solved to conquer Britain next. 




The Invasion of Britain by Julius Cesar. 

So Caesar came sailing over with 80 vessels and 12,000 
men. And he came from the French coast between Calais 
and Boulogne, "because thence was the shortest passage 
into Britain " — for the same reason that steamboats now 
take the same track every day. He expected to conquer 
Britain easily. But it was not easy work, for the Britons 
fo aght bravely. However, for once that the Britons beat 
him he beat them twice; still he was glad to accept their 
proposals of peace and go away. 



1 2 HI8T0R Y OF ENGLAND. 

But early in the next year he came back — this time with 
800 vessels and 30,000 men. The British tribes chose as 
their general-in-chief a Briton whom the Romans called 
Cassivellaunus, but whose British name was Caswallon. 
A brave general he was, and well he and his soldiers 
fought the Roman army — so well, that whenever the Ro- 
man soldiers heard the rattle of the rapid British chariots 
they trembled in their hearts. Several battles were fought. 
Brave Cassivellaunus had the worst of it, though he and 
his men always fought like lions. The British chiefs were 
always quarrelling with him and with one another, so he 
gave up and proposed peace. Ca3sar was glad to grant 
peace and go away with his remaining ships and men. 

Nearly a hundred years passed on, and all that time 
there was peace in Britain. The Britons improved their 
towns and mode of life, became more civilized, travelled, 
and learned a great deal from the Gauls and Romans. At 
last the Roman Emperor Claudius sent a mighty force to 
subdue the island, and shortly afterwards arrived himself. 
They did little, and another general came. Some of the 
British chiefs submitted ; others resolved to fight to the 
death. Of these, the bravest was Caractacus, who, with 
his army, gave battle to the Romans among the mountains 
of North Wales. " This day," said he to his soldiers, " de- 
cides the fate of Britain ! Your liberty or your eternal 
slavery dates from this hour. Remember your brave an- 
cestors, who drove the great Caesar himself across the sea." 
Hearing these words, his men rushed upon the Romans. 
But the strong Roman swords and armor were too much 
for the weaker British weapons in close conflict. The 
Britons lost the clay. The wife and daughter of the brave 
Caractacus were taken prisoners ; his brothers delivered 
themselves up; he himself was betrayed into the hands 
of the Romans, and they carried him and all his family 
in triumph to Rome. 

But a great man will be great in misfortune, great in 



ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE R03TANS. 



13 



prison, great in chains. His noble air so touched the 
Roman people, who thronged to see him, that he and his 
family were restored to freedom. No one knows whether 
he died in Rome or returned to his own country. 






5» 




Attack on the Island of Mona. 

Still the Britons would not yield. They rose again and 
again, and died by thousands, sword in hand. They rose 
on every possible occasion. Suetonius, another Roman 
general, came and stormed the Island of Anglesey (then 



14 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

called Mona), which was supposed to be sacred, and he 
burned the Druids in their own wicker-cages, by their own 
fires. But even while he was in Britain with his victori- 
ous troops, the Britons rose. Because Boadicea, a British 
queen, the widow of the King of the Norfolk and Suffolk 
people, resisted the plundering of the Romans who were 
settled in England, she was scourged by order of Catus, a 
Roman officer, her two daughters were insulted, and her 
husband's relations were made slaves. To avenge this in- 
jury, the Britons rose with all their might. They drove 
Catus into Gaul ; they laid the Roman possessions waste ; 
they forced the Romans out of London ; they hanged, 
burned, crucified, and slew by the sword 70,000 Romans 
in a few days. Suetonius strengthened his army and gave 
them battle. They strengthened their army and desper- 
ately attacked his on the field where it was strongly 
posted. Boadicea, in a war-chariot, with her fair hair 
streaming in the wind, drove among the troops and cried 
to them for vengeance on their oppressors, the licentious 
Romans. The Britons fought to the last, but they were 
vanquished with great slaughter, and the unhappy queen 
took poison. 

Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken. When 
Suetonius left the country they fell upon his troops and 
re-took the Island of Anglesey. Agricola came twenty 
years afterwards and re-took it once more, and devoted 
seven years to subduing the country, especially that part 
which is now called Scotland ; but its people, the Caledo- 
nians, resisted him at every inch of ground. They fought 
the bloodiest battles with him ; they killed their wives and 
children to prevent his making prisoners of them, then 
fell, fighting, in such great numbers that certain hills in 
Scotland are yet supposed to be vast heaps of stones piled 
up above their graves. Hadrian came thirty years after- 
wards, and they resisted him. Severus came nearly a hun- 
dred years afterwards, and they worried his great army 




Caractacus and Hts Wife at Rome. ( 15 ) 



16 // tSfOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

like dogs, and rejoiced to see them die by thousands in 
the bogs and swamps. Caracalla, the son of Severus, did 
the most to conquer them, but not by force of arms. He 
yielded up land to the Caledonians, and gave the Britons 
the same privileges as the Romans possessed. There was 
peace after this for seventy years. 

Then new enemies arose. They were the Saxons, a 
fierce people from the countries to the north of the Rhine, 
the great river of Germany. They came in pirate ships to 
plunder the sea-coast of Gaul and Britain. They were re- 
pulsed, but after a time they renewed their ravages. A 
few years more, and the Scots (which was then the name 
for the people of Ireland) and the Picts, a northern peo- 
ple, began plundering incursions into the south of Britain. 
All these attacks were repeated at intervals during two 
hundred years, and through a long succession of Roman 
emperors and chiefs, during which time the Britons rose 
against the Romans over and over again. At last, in the 
days of the Roman Honorius, when Roman power all over 
the world was fast declining and when Rome wanted all 
her soldiers at home, they abandoned all hope of conquer- 
ing Britain and went away. And still, at last as at first, 
the Britons rose against them in their old, brave manner; 
for, a little while before, they had turned away the Roman 
magistrates and declared themselves an independent 
people. 

Five hundred years had passed since Caesar's invasion 
of the Island, when the Romans departed from it forever. 
In that time, though they caused terrible bloodshed, they 
did much to improve the condition of the Britons. They 
made great military roads, built forts, taught them how to 
dress and arm themselves, and refined the whole British 
way of living. Agricola built a great wall of earth, more 
than seventy miles long, to keep out the Picts and Scots ; 
Hadrian strengthened it ; Severus built it afresh of stone. 
Above all, it was in the Roman time and by means of 



ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE ROMANS. 17 

Roman ships that the Christian religion was first brought 
into Britain, and its people first taught the great lesson 
that to be good in the sight of God they must love their 
neighbors as themselves and do unto others as they would 
be done by. The Druids deelared it wicked to believe 
this, and cursed the people who did believe it. But when 
the people found that they were none the better for the 
blessings of the Druids, and none the worse for their 
curses, but that the sun shone and the rain fell without 
consulting the Druids at all, they began to think that the 
Druids were mere men, and that it signified very little 
whether they cursed or blessed. After which, the pupils 
of the Druids fell off greatly in numbers, and the Druids 
took to other trades. 

Thus we come to the end of the Roman time in Eng- 
land. But little is known of those five hundred years, 
but some remains of them are still found. Often, when 
laborers are digging up the ground to make foundations 
for houses or churches, they light on rusty money that once 
belonged to the Romans. Fragments of plates from which 
they ate, of goblets from which they drank, and of pave- 
ment on which they trod, are discovered among the earth 
that is broken by the plough. Wells that the Romans 
sunk still yield water ; roads that they made form part of 
the highways. Traces of Roman camps overgrown with 
grass, and of mounds that are the burial-places of heaps 
of Britons, are to be seen in almost all parts of the coun- 
try. Across the bleak moors of Northumberland the wall 
of Severus, overrun with moss and weeds, still stretches, 
a strong ruin, and the shepherds and their dogs lie sleep- 
ing on it in the summer weather. Stonehenge yet stands 
— a monument of the earlier time when the Roman name 
was unknown in Britain, and when the Druids, with their 
magic wands, could not have written it in the sands of the 
wild sea-shore. 



2 



CHAPTER II. 

ENGLAND UNDER THE f^ARLY SAXONS. 

The Romans had scarcely gone when the Britons wished 
they had never left. The Romans being gone, and the 
Britons being reduced in numbers by their long wars, the 
Picts and Scots came pouring in swarms over the un- 
guarded wall of Severus. They plundered the rich towns 
and killed the people, and came back so often for more 
booty that the Britons lived a life of terror. As if the 
Picts and Scots were not bad enough on land, the Saxons 
attacked the islanders by sea; and, as if something more 
were wanting, they quarrelled bitterly among themselves 
as to what prayers they ought to say and how they ought 
to say them. The priests, being angry with one another 
on these questions, cursed one another in the heartiest 
manner, and cursed all the people whom they could not 
persuade. So the Britons were badly off. 

They were in such distress that they sent a message to 
Rome, entreating help, in which they said, " The bar- 
barians chase us into the sea, the sea throws us back upon 
the barbarians, and we have only the hard choice left us 
of perishing by the sword or perishing by the waves." 
But the Romans could not help them; they had enough 
to do to defend themselves against their own enemies, 
who were very fierce and strong. At last the Britons re- 
solved to make peace with the Saxons, and invited them 
into their country to help keep out the Picts and Scots. 

It w T as a British prince, Vortigern, who took this resolu- 
tion, and made a treaty of friendship with Hengist and 
Horsa, two Saxon chiefs. They drove out the Picts and 
(18) 



ENGLAND UNDER THE EARLY SAXONS. 



19 



Scots; and Vortigern, being grateful to them, made no op- 
position to their settling in that part of England which is 
called the Isle of Thanet, or to their inviting over more 
of their countrymen to join them. Hengist had a beauti- 
ful daughter named Rowena ; and when, at a feast, she 
filled a golden goblet to the brim with wine and gave it to 
Vortigern, saying, in a sweet voice, " Dear king, thy 
health !" the king fell in love with her. 




The Cup of Welcome to Vortigern. 



They married, and whenever the king was angry with 
the Saxons Rowena would put her arms round his neck 
and softly say, " Dear king, they are my people ! Be 
favorable to them, as you loved that Saxon girl who gave 
you the golden goblet of wine at the feast." 

In time Vortigern died and Rowena died, and genera- 
tions of Saxons and Britons died, and events that happened 



20 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

during a long time would have been forgotten but for the 
songs of the old bards, who used to go from feast to feast, 
recounting the deeds of their forefathers. Among the his- 
tories of which they sang and talked there was a famous 
one concerning the bravery and virtues of King Arthur, 
supposed to have been a British prince in those old times. 
Whether such a person really lived, or whether there were 
several persons whose histories came to be confused to- 
gether under that one name, or whether all about him was 
invention, no one knows. 

In and long after the days of Vortigern, fresh bodies of 
Saxons came pouring into Britain. One body, conquering 
the Britons in the East and settling there, called their 
kingdom Essex; another body settled in the West and 
called their kingdom Wessex; the Northfolk, or Norfolk 
people, established themselves in one place ; the Soutli folk, 
or Suffolk people, established themselves in another, and 
gradually seven kingdoms or states arose in England, 
which were called the Saxon Heptarchy. The poor 
Britons, falling back before these crowds of fighting men 
whom they had innocently invited over as friends, retired 
into Wales, into Devonshire and into Cornwall. 

Kent is the most famous of the seven Saxon kingdoms. 
The Christian religion was preached to the Saxons there 
by Augustine, a monk from Rome. King Ethelbert of 
Kent was converted. The moment he said he was a Chris- 
tian, his courtiers all said they were Christians; after 
which 10,000 of his subjects said they were Christians, too. 
Augustine built a little church close to this king's palace, 
on the ground now occupied by the cathedral of Canter- 
bury. The king's nephew built on a muddy, marshy 
place near London, where there had been a temple to 
Apollo, a church dedicated to Saint Peter, which is now 
Westminster Abbey, and in London itself, on the foun- 
dation of a temple to Diana, he built another little church, 
which has risen up since that old time to be Saint Paul's. 




The Northmen. 



(21) 



22 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

After the death of Ethelbert, Edwin, King of Northum- 
bria, allowed his child to be baptized, and held a council 
to consider whether he and his people should all be Chris- 
tians or not. It was decided that they should be. From 
that time Christianity spread itself and became their 
faith. 

The next prince was Egbert. He lived about 150 years 
afterwards, and claimed to have a better right to the throne 
of Wessex than Beortric, another Saxon prince who was at 
the head of that kingdom, and who married Edburga, the 
daughter of Offa, king of another of the seven kingdoms. 
This Queen Edburga was a murderess. One clay she mixed 
a cup of poison for a noble belonging to the court, but her 
husband drank of it by mistake and died. Upon this the 
people revolted, and. running to the palace, cried, " Down 
with the wicked queen who poisons men!" They drove 
her out of the country, and abolished the title she had 
disgraced. 

Egbert, not considering himself safe in England, having 
claimed the crown of Wessex (for he thought his rival 
might take him prisoner and put him to death), sought 
refuge at the court of Charlemagne, King of France. On 
the death of Beortric he came back to Britain, succeeded 
to the throne of Wessex, conquered some of the other mon- 
archs of the seven kingdoms, added their territories to his 
own, and, for the first time, called the country over which 
he ruled, England. 

And now new enemies arose, who, for a long time, 
troubled England sorely. These were the Northmen— the 
people of Denmark and Norway, whom the English called 
the Danes. They were a warlike people, quite at home 
upon the sea ; not Christians ; very daring and cruel. They 
came over in ships, and plundered and burned whereso- 
ever they landed. Once they beat Egbert in battle ; once 
Egbert beat them. But they cared nothing for being 
beaten. In the four following short reigns of Ethelwulf 



TEE GOOD SAXON, ALFRED. 23 

and his sons Ethelbald, Ethelbert and Ethelred, they came 
back over and over again, burning and plundering, and 
laying England waste. They seized Edmund, King of 
East England, and bound him to a tree. They proposed 
that he should change his religion, but he steadily refused. 
Upon that they beat him, shot arrows at him, and finally 
struck off his head. It is impossible to say whose head 
they might have struck off next but for the death of King 
Ethelred, and the succession to his throne of the best and 
wisest king that ever lived in England. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE GOOD SAXON, ALFRED. 

Alfred the Great was a young man, twenty-three 
years old, when he became king. Twice in his childhood 
he had been taken to Rome, where the Saxon nobles were 
in the habit of going on religious journeys, and once he 
went to Paris. Learning was so little cared for then that 
at twelve years old he had not been taught to read, 
although of the sons of King Ethelwulf he was the favor- 
ite. But he had — as most men who grow up to be great 
and good are generally found to have had — an excellent 
mother, and one day this lady read a book of Saxon poetry. 
The art of printing was not known until long after that 
period, and the book, which was written, was what is 
called " illuminated " with bright letters, richly painted. 
The brothers admiring it very much, their mother said, 
" I will give it to that one of you who first learns to read." 
Alfred sought out a tutor, applied himself to learn, and 
won the book. 

This great king, in the first year of his reign, fought nine 



24 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

battles with the Danes. He made some treaties with them, 
too, by which the false Danes swore they would quit the 
country. But they thought nothing of breaking oaths, and 
treaties, too, when it suited their purpose, and coming back 
ao-ain to fight, plunder and burn as usual. One fatal win- 
ter, in the fourth year of Alfred's reign, they spread them- 
selves over all England, and so routed the king's soldiers 
that the king was left alone, and was obliged to disguise 
himself as a peasant and take refuge in the cottage of one 
of his cowherds, who did not know his face. 

Here Alfred, while the Danes sought him far and near, 
was left alone one day by the cowherd's wife to watch 
some cakes which she put to bake upon the hearth. Think- 
ing of his unhappy subjects, whom the Danes chased 
through the land, he forgot the cakes, and they were burned. 
" What !" said the wife, who little thought she was scolding 
the king. u You will be ready enough to eat them by and 
by, and yet you cannot watch them, idle dog !" 

At length the Devonshire men made head against a new 
host of Danes who landed on their coast, killed their chief 
and captured their flag (on which was the likeness of a 
raven). The loss of their standard troubled them greatly, 
for they believed it to be enchanted. They had a story 
that when they were victorious in battle the raven 
stretched his wings and seemed to fly, and when defeated 
he would droop. He had reason to droop now, for Alfred 
joined the Devonshire men, and prepared for vengeance 
on the Danes and the deliverance of his oppressed people. 

It was important to know how numerous those pestilent 
Danes were, and how they were fortified. Alfred, being a 
good musician, disguised himself 'as a glee-man, or min- 
strel, and went with his harp to the Danish camp. He 
played and sang in the very tent of Guthrum, the Danish 
leader, and entertained the Danes as they caroused. While 
he seemed to think of nothing but his music lie was watch- 
ful of their tents, their arms, their discipline— everything 



THE GOOD SAXON, ALFRED. 



25 



that he desired to know. And soon did this great king en- 
tertain them to a different tune ; for, summoning all his 
followers to meet him, he put himself at their head, de- 
feated the Danes with great slaughter, and besieged them 
to prevent their escape. Bu f , being ns merciful as he was 



pi! 

4m 



M wi 







Alfred and His Mother. 



good and brave, he, instead of killing them, proposed peace, 
on condition that they should altogether depart from that 
western part of England and settle in the East, and that 
Guthrum should become a Christian. This Guthrum did. 
At his baptism Alfred was his godfather. Guthrum de- 
served that clemency, for ever afterwards he was loyal and 
faithful to the king. The Danes under him were faithful, 
too. They plundered and burned no more, but worked 



26 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

like honest men. They ploughed and sowed and reaped, 
and led good, honest English lives. 

All the Danes were not like these under Guthrum ; for, 
after some years, more of them came over in the old plun- 
dering and burning way. For three years there was a war 
with these Danes ; and there was a famine in the country, 
too, and a plague, both upon human creatures and beasts. 
But Alfred, whose heart never failed him, built large ships 
to pursue the pirates on the sea, encouraged his soldiers 
to fight valiantly against them on the shore, drove them 
all away, and then there was repose in England. 

As great and good in peace as he was great and good in 
war, Alfred never rested from his labors to improve his 
people. He loved to talk with clever men, and to write 
down what they told him for his people to read. He 
studied Latin after learning to read English ; he translated 
Latin books into the English-Saxon tongue, that his peo- 
ple might be improved by their contents. He made just 
laws, that they might live more happily ; he turned away 
all partial judges, that no wrong might be done them — he 
was so careful of their property, and punished robbers so 
severely. He founded schools ; he patiently heard causes 
himself in his court of justice. The great desires of his 
heart were to do right to all his subjects, and to leave Eng- 
land better, wiser, happier in all ways than he found it. 
His industry in these efforts was astonishing. Every day 
he divided into certain portions, and in each portion de- 
voted himself to a certain pursuit. 

All this time he was afflicted with an unknown disease, 
which caused him violent pain that nothing could relieve. 
He bore it like a brave man until he was fifty-three years 
old, and then, having reigned thirty years, he died, in the 
year 901. Long ago as that is, his fame and the love and 
gratitude with which his subjects regarded him are re- 
membered to this hour. 

In the reign of Edward, surnamed The Elder, who was 



THE GOOD SAXON, ALFRED. 



27 



chosen in council to succeed, a nephew of King Alfred 
troubled the country in trying to obtain the throne. The 
Danes in the east of England took part with this usurper, 




Alfred at His Books. 



and there was hard fighting; but the king, with the assist- 
ance of his sister, gained the day, and reigned in peace 
for twenty-four years. He gradually extended his power 
over the whole of England, and so the seven kingdoms 
were united into one. 



28 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

When England thus became one kingdom, ruled over 
by one Saxon king, the Saxons had been settled in the 
country more than 450 years. Great changes had taken 
place in its customs during that time. The Saxons were 
still greedy eaters and great drinkers, but many new com- 
forts had become known and were fast increasing. Hang- 
ings for the walls of rooms are known to have been made 
of silk, ornamented with birds and flowers in needlework. 
Tables and chairs were curiously carved in different woods; 
were sometimes decorated with gold or silver; sometimes 
even made of those precious metals. Knives and spoons 
were used at table; golden ornaments were worn, with 
silk and cloth, and golden embroideries; dishes were made 
of gold and silver, brass and bone. There were varieties 
of drinking-horns, bedsteads, musical instruments. A 
harp was passed round at a feast, like the drinking-bowl, 
from guest to guest, and each one usually sang or played 
when his turn came. The weapons of the Saxons were 
stoutly made, and among them was a terrible iron ham- 
mer that gave deadly blows, and was long remembered. 
The Saxons themselves were a handsome people. The 
men were proud of their long, fair hair, parted on the fore- 
head ; their ample beards, their fresh complexions and 
clear eyes. The beauty of the Saxon women filled all 
England with a new delight and grace. 



CHAPTER IV. 

ATHELSTAN AND THE SIX BOY-KINGS. 

Athelstan, the son of Edward, succeeded that king. He 
reigned fifteen years, and governed England well. He 
reduced the people of Wales, and obliged them to pay 



ATHELSTAN AND THE SIX BOY-KINGS. 29 

tribute in money and in cattle. He was victorious over 
the Cornishmen, who were not yet quite under the Saxon 
government. He restored such of the old laws as were 
good and had fallen into disuse, made some wise new 
laws, and took care of the poor and weak. He broke a 
strong alliance made against him by the Danes, Scots, and 
the people of North Wales, defeating them in one great 
battle, long famous for the vast numbers slain in it. After 
that he had a quiet reign, and foreign princes visited the 
English court. 

When Athelstan died, his brother Edmund, who was 
only eighteen, became king. He was the first of six boy- 
kings. They called him The Magnificent, because he 
showed a taste for refinement. But he was beset by the 
Danes, and had a short and troubled reign. 

Then succeeded the boy-king Edred, who was weak and 
sickly in body, but of a strong mind. His armies fought 
the Northmen (the Danes and Norwegians, or the sea- 
kings, as they were called), and beat them for the time. 
And in nine years Edred died and passed away. 

Then came the boy-king Edwy, fifteen years of age ; 
but the real king, who had the real power, was a nrbnk 
named Dunstan — a clever priest, a little mad, and not a 
little proud and cruel. 

Dunstan was then Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey. The 
priests of those days were generally the only scholars. 
They were learned in many things. Having to make their 
own convents and monasteries on uncultivated grounds 
that were granted to them by the crown, it was necessary 
that they should be good farmers and good gardeners, or 
their lands would have been too poor to support them. 
For the decoration of the chapels where they prayed, and 
for the comfort of the refectories where they ate and drank, 
it was necessary that there should be good carpenters, 
good smiths, good painters among them. For their greater 
safety in sickness and accident, living alone by themselves 



30 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

in solitary places, it was necessary that they should study 
the virtues of plants and herbs, and should know how to 
dress cuts, hums, scalds and bruises, and how to set 
broken limbs. Accordingly, they taught themselves and 
one another a great variety of useful arts, and became 
skilful in agriculture, medicine, surgery and handicraft. 

On the day of the coronation of the handsome boy-king 
Edwy, it was remarked that the king quietly left the coro- 
nation-feast while all the company were there. Dunstan, 
finding him in the company of his young wife Elgiva and 
her mother, dragged him back into the feasting-hall by 
force. 

The young king was old enough to feel this insult. 
Dunstan had been treasurer in the last reign, and Edwy 
charged him with taking some of the last king's money. 
The abbot fled to Belgium. He conspired with the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury to set up the king's young brother 
Edgar as his rival for the throne ; and, not content with 
this revenge, he caused Queen Elgiva to be stolen, branded 
in the cheek with a red-hot iron, and sold into slavery in 
Ireland. But the Irish people befriended her, and they 
said, " Let us restore the girl-queen to the boy-king, and 
make the young lovers happy !" and they cured her 
wound, and sent her home as beautiful as before. But 
the villain, Dunstan, caused her to be waylaid as she was 
hurrying to join her husband, and to be hacked with 
swords and left to die. When Edwy the Fair heard of 
her dreadful fate he died of a broken heart. 

Then came the boy-king Edgar, called The Peaceful, fif- 
teen years old. Dunstan, being still the real king, made 
himself Archbishop of Canterbury for his greater glory, 
and exercised such power over the neighboring British 
princes, and so collected them about the king, that once, 
when the kino- went on the river Dee, the eight oars of his 
boat were pulled by eight crowned kings. As Edgar was 
obedient to Dunstan and the monks, they represented him 



ATHELSTAN AND THE SIX BOY- KINGS. 



31 



as the best of kings, but he was really profligate, debauched 
and vicious. He once forcibly carried off a young lady 
from the convent at Wilton ; and Dunstan, pretending to 
be shocked, condemned him not to wear his crown for 
seven years. His marriage with his second wife, Elfrida, 
was one of the worst events of his reign. Hearing of this 




Death of Edward The Martyr. 



lady's beauty, he sent his courtier, Athelwold, to her 
father's castle to see if she were as charming as fame re- 
ported. She was exceedingly beautiful, and Athelwold 
fell in love with and married her; but he told the king 
that she was rich, not handsome. The king, suspecting 
the truth, told Athelwold to prepare for his visit. Athel- 
wold confessed to his young wife what he had said and 



32 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

done, and implored her to disguise her beauty by some 
ugly dress or silly manner, that he might be safe from the 
king's anger. She promised she would ; but she was a 
proud woman, who would rather be a queen than the wife 
of a courtier. She dressed in her best, and adorned her- 
self with her richest jewels, and when the king came he 
discovered the cheat. So he caused Athelvvold to be mur- 
dered and married his widow, this bad Elfrida. Six years 
afterwards he died and was buried in the abbey of Glas- 
tonbury, which he — or Dnnstan for him — had much en- 
riched. 

Then came the boy-king Edward, called The Martyr, 
from the manner of his death. Elfrida had a son, named 
Ethelred, for whom she claimed the throne ; but Dunstan 
did not favor him, and lie made Edward king. The boy 
was hunting one day, when he rode near where Elfrida 
and Ethelred lived. Wishing to see them kindly, he rode 
away from his attendants and galloped to the castle-gate, 
where he arrived at twilight, and blew his hunting-horn. 
'• You are welcome, dear king," said Elfrida. " Pray you 
dismount and enter." " Not so, dear madam," said the 
king. " My company will miss me, and fear that I have 
met with some harm. Please you to give me a cup of wine, 
that I may drink here in the saddle to you and to my little 
brother, and so ride away." Elfrida, going in to bring the 
wine, whispered to an armed servant, who stole out and 
crept behind the king's horse. As the king raised the cup 
to his lips, saying " Health !" to the wicked woman who 
was smiling on him, and to his innocent brother whose 
hand she held in hers, this armed man stabbed him in the 
back. 

Then came the sixth and last of the boy -kings, Ethel- 
red. The people so disliked this boy, on account of his 
cruel mother and the murder she had done to promote 
him, that Dunstan would not have had him for king, but 
would have made Edgitha, the daughter of the dead king 



ATUELSTAN AND THE SIX BOY-KINGS. 33 

Edgar and of the lady whom he stole out of the convent 
at Wilton, Queen of England, if she would have consented. 
But she would not be persuaded from the convent where 
she lived in peace ; so Dunstan put Ethelred on the throne 
and gave him the nickname of " The Unready," knowing 
that he wanted resolution and firmness. At first Elfrida 
possessed great influence over the young king; but as he 
grew older her influence declined. Not having it in her 
power to do any more evil, she retired from court, and, 
after the fashion of the time, built churches and mon- 
asteries to expiate her guilt. 

About the tenth year of this reign Dunstan died, and 
the monks settled that he was a saint, and called him St. 
Dunstan ever afterwards. 

Ethelred was glad to be rid of this holy saint ; but, left 
to himself, he was a poor, weak king, and his reign was 
one of defeat and shame. The restless Danes, led by 
Sweyn,a son of the Kingof Denmark, who had quarrelled 
with his father and had been banished from home, again 
came into England, and year after year attacked and de- 
spoiled large towns. To coax these sea-kings away the 
weak Ethelred paid them money ; but the more money he 
paid the more money they wanted. As they still came 
back and wanted more, he thought it would be a good plan 
to marry into some powerful foreign family that would 
help him with soldiers. So in the year 1002 he married 
Emma, the sister of Richard, Duke of Normandy — a lady 
who was called the Flower of Normandy. 

And now a terrible deed was done in England, the like 
of which was never done on English ground before or 
since. On November 13, in pursuance of secret instruc- 
tions sent by the king, the inhabitants of every town 
and city armed themselves, and murdered all the Danes 
who were their neighbors. Young and old, babies and 
soldiers, men and women — every Dane was killed. They 
were all slain, even to Gunhilda, the sister of the King 

3 



3 4 HIS TOBY OF ENGLAND. 

of Denmark married to an English lord, who was first 
obliged to Bee the murder of her husband and her child, 
and was then herself killed. 

When the king of the sea-kings heard of this deed of 
blood he swore that he would have a great revenge. He 
raised an army and a mightier fleet of ships than ever yet 
had sailed to England. And in all his army there was not 
a slave nor an old man ; but every soldier was a freeman 
and in the prime of life, and sworn to be revenged upon 
the English nation for that dread massacre. And so the 
sea-kings came to England in many great ships, each bear- 
ing the flag of its own commander. The ship that bore 
the standard of the king of the sea-kings was carved and 
painted like a mighty serpent ; and the king, in his anger, 
prayed that the gods in whom he trusted might all desert 
him if his serpent did not strike its fangs into England's 
heart. 

And it did ; for the great army, landing near Exeter, 
went forward, laying England waste. In remembrance 
of the black November night when the Danes were mur- 
dered, wheresoever the invaders came they made the Sax- 
ons spread for them great feasts ; and when they had eaten 
those feasts, and had drunk a curse to England with wild 
rejoicings, they drew their swords, and killed their Saxon 
entertainers, and marched on. For six long years they 
carried on this war; burning the crops, farm-houses, 
barns, mills, granaries ; killing the laborers in the fields ; 
preventing the seeds from being sown in the ground ; caus- 
ing famine and starvation ; leaving only heaps of ruin 
and smoking ashes where they had found rich towns. To 
crown this misery, English officers and men deserted ; 
and even the favorites of Ethelred, becoming traitors, 
seized many of the English ships, turned pirates against 
their own country, and, aided by a storm, occasioned the 
loss of nearly the whole English navy. 

There was but one man of note w T ho was true to his 



ATHELSTAN AND TEE SIX BOY-KINGS. 35 

country and the feeble king. He was a priest, and a brave 
one. For twenty days the Archbishop of Canterbury de- 
fended that city against its Danish besiegers ; and when a 
traitor in the town threw the gates open and admitted 
them, he said, in chains, " I will not buy my life with 
money that must be extorted from the suffering people. 
Do with me what you please I" He steadily refused to 
purchase his release with gold wrung from the poor. 

The Danes gathered round him, threatening, but he 
stood unmoved. Then one man struck him ; then an- 
other ; then a cursing soldier picked up from a heap in the 
corner of the hall a great ox-bone and cast it at his face, 
from which the blood came spurting forth ; then others ran 
to the same heap and knocked him down with other 
bones, and bruised and battered him, until one soldier 
struck him dead with his battle-axe. 

If Ethelredhadhad the courage of this noble archbishop, 
he might have done something yet. But he paid the Danes 
large sums, instead, and gained so little by the cowardly 
act that Sweyn soon afterwards came over to subdue ail 
England. So broken was the attachment of the English 
people, by this time, to their incapable king, that they wel- 
comed Sweyn as a deliverer. London stood out as long 
as the king was within its walls, but when he sneaked 
away it also welcomed the Dane. Then all was over, and 
the king took refuge abroad with the Duke of Normandy, 
who had given shelter to the king's wife and children. 

Still the English people, in spite of their sufferings, 
could not forget the great King Alfred and the Saxon race. 
When Sweyn died suddenly, about a month after he had 
been proclaimed King of England, they generously sent to 
Ethelred, to say that they would make him king again 
" if he would govern them better than he had governed 
them before." The Unready sent one of his sons to 
make promises for him. At last he followed, and the 
English declared him king. The Danes declared Canute, 



3 6 HIS TOR Y OF ENGL A ND. 

the son of Sweyn, king. Thus direful war began again, 
and lasted for three years, when The Unready died. 

Was Canute to be king now ? Not over the Saxons, 
they said ; they must have Edmund (one of the sons 
of The Unready), who was surnamed Ironside because of 
his strength and stature. Edmund and Canute thereupon 
fought five battles ; and then Ironside, who was a big 
man, proposed to Canute, who was a little man, that they 
two should fight it out in single combat. Canute de- 
cidedly said No, but declared that he was willing to divide 
the kingdom— to take all that lay north of Watling Street, 
as the old Roman military road from Dover to Chester was 
called, and to give Ironside all that lay south of it. Most 
men being weary of so much bloodshed, this was done. 
But Canute soon became sole King of England, for 
Ironside died suddenly within two months. Some think 
that he was killed bv Canute's orders. No one knows. 



CHAPTER V. 

CANUTE, THE DANE. 

Canute reigned eighteen years. He was a merciless 
king at first. After he had clasped the hands of the 
Saxon chiefs, in token of the sincerity with which he swore 
to be just to them in return for their acknowledging him, 
he denounced and slew many of them. " He who brings 
me the head of one of my enemies." he used to say, " shall 
be dearer to me than a brother." He was inclined to kill 
Edmund and Edward, two children, sons of poor Ironside ; 
but, being afraid to do so in England, he sent them over 
to the King of Sweden, with a request that the king would 




CANUTE AND THE SEA. 



(37) 



38 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

" dispose of thorn." But the King of Sweden was a kind 
man, and brought them up tenderly. 

Normandy ran much in Canute's mind. In Normandy 
were the two children of the late king — Edward and Al- 
fred, by name — and their uncle, the duke, might one clay 
claim the crown for them. But the duke showed so little 
inclination to do so now that he proposed to Canute to 
marry his sister, the widow of The Unready, who, desiring 
to become a queen again, left her children and was wedded 
to him. 

Successful and triumphant, assisted by the valor of the 
English in his foreign wars, and with little strife at home, 
Canute had a prosperous reign, and made many improve- 
ments. He was a poet and a musician. He grew sorry, 
as he grew older, for the blood he had shed at first, and 
went to Rome in a pilgrim's dress by way of washing it 
out. On the whole, however, he became a far better man 
when he had no opposition to contend with, and was as 
great a king as England had known for some time. 

The old writers relate how Canute was one day dis- 
gusted with his courtiers for their Hattery, and how he 
caused his chair to be set on the sea-shore and commanded 
the tide, as it came up, not to wet the edge of his robe, for 
the land was his ; how the tide came up, of course, with- 
out regarding him, and how he then turned to his flatter- 
ers and rebuked them, saying, What was the might of 
any earthly king to the might of the Creator, who could 
say unto the sea " Thus far shalt thou go, and no far- 
ther!" 

It is not the sea alone that is bidden to go " Thus far, and 
no farther." The great command goes forth to all the 
kings upon the earth, and went to Canute in the year 1035, 
and stretched him dead upon his bed. 



CHAPTER VI. 

HAROLD HAREFOOT, HARDICANUTE, AND EDWARD THE 
CONFESSOR. 

Canute left three sons, named Sweyn, Harold and Har- 
dicanute; but his queen, Emma, was the mother of only 
Hardicanute. Canute wished his dominions divided be- 
tween the three, Harold to have England ; but the Saxon 
people in the south of England, headed by a nobleman, 
with great possessions, called Earl Godwin, opposed this, 
and wanted either Hardicanute or one of the two exiled 
princes who were over in Normandy. It was agreed to 
refer the matter to a great meeting at Oxford, which de- 
cided that Harold should have all the country north of 
the Thames, with London for his capital city, and that 
Hardicanute should have all the south. The quarrel was 
so arranged, and as Hardicanute was in Denmark, his 
mother and Earl Godwin governed the south for him. 

They had hardly begun to do so when Edward, the 
elder of the two exiled princes, came over from Normandy 
with a few followers to claim the English crown. His 
mother Emma, who cared only for her last son, Hardica- 
nute, opposed him so strongly that he was glad to get 
safely back. His brother Alfred was not so fortunate. Be- 
lieving in a letter written in his mother's name, he allowed 
himself to be tempted over to England with a good force 
of soldiers, and landing on the Kentish coast, and being 
met and welcomed by Earl Godwin, proceeded into Surrey, 
as far as the town of Guildford. Here he and his men 
halted in the evening to rest, having still the earl in the 

(39) 



40 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

company, who had ordered lodgings and good cheer for 
them. In the dead of the night they were set upon by the 
king's troops and taken prisoners. Next day six hundred 
of them were drawn out in a line, tortured and killed, 
with the exception of every tenth man, who was sold into 
slavery. Prince Alfred was stripped naked, tied to a horse, 
and sent away into the Isle of Ely, where his eyes were 
torn out of his head, and where, in a few days, he died. 

Harold was now king over all England. He was king 
for* four years, after which short reign he died and was 
buried, having never done much in life but go a-hunting. 
He was such a fast runner that the people called him 
Harold Harefoot. 

Hardicanute was then at Bruges, in Flanders, plotting 
with his mother for the invasion of England. The Danes 
and Saxons, rinding themselves without a king and dread- 
ing new disputes, joined in inviting him to occupy the 
throne. He consented, and soon troubled them enough, 
for he brought over numbers of Danes, and so taxed the 
people to enrich those greedy favorites that there were 
many insurrections, especially one at Worcester, where the 
citizens rose and killed his tax-collectors ; in revenge for 
which he burned their city. He was a brutal king, whose 
first public act was to order the dead body of poor Harold 
Harefoot to be dug up, beheaded and thrown into the river. 
His end was worthy of such a beginning. He fell down 
drunk, and never spoke again. 

Edward, afterwards called The Confessor, succeeded. 
He obliged his mother Emma to retire into the country, 
where she died some ten years afterwards. He was the 
exiled prince whose brother Alfred had been so foully 
killed. He had been invited over from Normandy by Har- 
dicanute, and had been well treated at court. His cause 
was favored by Earl Godwin, and he was soon made king. 
This earl had been tried for the prince's murder, but had 
been pronounced not guilty. It was his interest to help the 



HAROLD HAREFOOT, HARDICANUTE, AND ED WA RD. 4 1 

new king with his power, if the new king would help him 
against the popular distrust and hatred. So they made a 
bargain. Edward the Confessor got the throne. The earl 
got more power and more land, and his daughter Editha 
was made queen ; for it was a part of their compact that 
the king should take her for his wife. 

But, although she was a gentle lady, in all things worthy 
to be beloved — good, beautiful, sensible and kind — the 
king from the first neglected her. Her father and her six 
proud brothers, resenting this cold treatment, harassed 
the king greatly by exerting all their power to make him 
unpopular. Having lived so long in Normandy, he pre- 
ferred the Normans to the English. He made a Norman 
archbishop and Norman bishops ; his great officers and 
favorites were all Normans ; he introduced the Norman 
fashions and the Norman language ; in imitation of the 
state custom of Normandy, he attached a great seal to his 
state documents, instead of merely marking them, as the 
Saxon kings had done, with the sign of the cross— just as 
people who cannot write now make the same mark for 
their names. All this Earl Godwin and his six proud 
sons represented to the people as disfavor shown towards 
the English, and thus they daily increased their own power 
and daily diminished the power of the king. 

Edward got Godwin and his six sons out of his way, and 
favored the Normans more than ever. He invited over 
William, Duke of Normandy, the son of that duke who 
had received him and his murdered brother long ago. 
William accepted the invitation, and the Normans in Eng- 
land, finding themselves more numerous than ever when 
he arrived with his retinue, and held in still greater honor 
at court than before, became more haughty towards the 
people, and were more disliked by them. 

The old Earl Godwin knew well how the people felt, 
for he kept paid spies and agents all over England. Ac- 
cordingly, he thought the time was come for fitting out a 



42 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

great expedition against the Norman-loving king. With 
it he sailed to the Isle of Wight, where he was joined by 
his son Harold, the bravest of all his family. And so the 
father and son went sailing up the Thames to Southwark, 
great numbers of the people declaring for them, and shout- 
ing for the English earl and the English Harold, against 
the Norman favorites. 

The king was at first as blind and stubborn as kings 
usually have been. But the people rallied so thickly 
around the old earl and his son, and the old earl was so 
steady in demanding, without bloodshed, the restoration 
of himself and his family to their rights, that at last the 
court took the alarm. The Norman Archbishop of Canter- 
bury and the Norman Bishop of London, surrounded by 
their retainers, fought their way out of London, and es- 
caped from Essex to France in a fishing-boat. The other 
Norman favorites dispersed in all directions. The old earl 
and his sons, except Sweyn, who had committed crimes 
against the law, were restored to their possessions and dig- 
nities. 

Godwin did not long enjoy his restored fortune. He fell 
down in a fit at the king's table, and died upon the third 
day afterwards. Harold succeeded to his power, and to a 
far higher place in the attachment of the people than his 
father had ever held. He subdued the king's enemies in 
many bloody fights, and was vigorous against rebels in 
Scotland. He was driven on the French coast by a tempest, 
and was taken prisoner. In those days all shipwrecked 
strangers were taken prisoners and obliged to pay ransom. 

Harold sent to Duke William of Normandy complaining 
of this treatment, and the duke ordered him to be escorted 
to Rouen, where he received him as an honored guest. 
Some writers tell us that Edward the Confessor had made 
a will, appointing Duke William of Normandy his succes- 
sor. He was anxious about his successor, and invited over 
Edward the Outlaw, a son of Ironside, who had come to 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 43 

England with his wife and three children, but whom the 
king had strangely refused to see when he did come, and 
who had died in London suddenly (princes were terribly 
liable to sudden death in those days), and had been buried 
in St. Paul's Cathedral. The king might have made such 
a will, or he might have encouraged William to aspire to 
the English crown by something that he said to him. But 
certainly William did not now aspire to it, and, knowing 
that Harold would be a powerful rival, he called together 
a great assembly of his nobles, offered Harold his daugh- 
ter Adele in marriage, informed him that he meant, on 
King Edward's death, to claim the English crown, and re- 
quired Harold then and there to swear to aid him. Har- 
old, being in the duke's power, took this oath upon the 
missal, or prayer-book. This missal, instead of being 
placed upon a table, was placed upon a tub, which, when 
Harold had sworn, was uncovered, and shown to be full of 
dead men's bones — bones, as the monks pretended, of 
saints. This was supposed to make Harold's oath more 
impressive and binding. 

Within a week or two after Harold's return to England 
The Confessor was found to be dying. As he had put him- 
self entirely in the hands of the monks when he was alive, 
they praised him lustily when he was dead. 



CHAPTER VII. 

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 



Harold was crowned King of England on the day of The 
Confessor's funeral. When the news reached William, he 
called his nobles to council and sent to Harold, calling on 
him to keep his oath and resign the crown. Harold would 



44 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

do no such thing. The barons of France leagued around 
William for the invasion of England. William promised 
to distribute English wealth and English lands among 
them. The pope sent to Normandy a consecrated banner 
and blessed the enterprise. 

King Harold had a rebel brother in Flanders who was 
a vassal of the King of Norway. This brother and this 
Norwegian king, joining their forces against England, with 
William's help won a fight, and then besieged York. 
Harold, who was waiting for the Normans on the coast at 
Hastings with his army, marched to give them instant 
battle. 

And such a fight did Harold lead against that force that 
his brother and the Norwegian king, and every chief of 
note in all their host, were left dead upon the field. The 
victorious army marched to York. As Harold sat there at 
the feast, messengers came hurrying in to report that the 
Normans had landed in England. 

The intelligence was true. They had been tossed about 
by contrary winds, and some of their ships had been 
wrecked. A part of their own shore, to which they had 
been driven back, was strewn with Norman bodies. But 
they once more made sail, led by the duke's own galley. 
By day the banner of the Three Lions of Normandy 
had glittered in the sun; by night a light had sparkled 
like a star at her mast-head. And now, camped near 
Hastings, with the English retiring in all directions, the 
land for miles around scorched and smoking, fired and 
pillaged, was the whole Norman power, hopeful and 
strong, on English ground. 

Harold broke up the feast and hurried to London. 
Within a week his army was ready. He sent out spies to 
ascertain the Norman strength. William took them, 
caused them to be led through his camp, and then dis- 
missed. " The Normans," said these spies to Harold, " are 
not bearded on the upper lip as we English are, but are 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 45 

shorn. The}' are priests." " My men," replied Harold, 
with a laugh, " will find those priests good soldiers !" 

Proposals for a reconciliation were made but abandoned. 
In the middle of October, 1066, the Normans and the Eng- 
lish came front to front. All night the armies lay camped 
before each other in a part of the country then called Sen- 
lac, now called Battle. With the first dawn of day they 
arose. There, in the faint light, were the English on a 
hill ; a wood behind them ; in their midst the royal ban- 
ner representing a fighting warrior, woven in gold thread, 
adorned with precious stones ; beneath the banner stood 
King Harold on foot, with two of his brothers by his side ; 
around them, still and silent as the dead, clustered the 
whole English army — every soldier covered by his shield 
and bearing in his hand his dreaded English battle-axe. 

On an opposite hill, in three lines, archers, foot-soldiers, 
horsemen, was the Norman force. Of a sudden a great 
battle-cry, " God help us !" burst from the Norman lines. 
The English answered with their own battle-cry, " God's 
Rood! Holy Rood!" The Normans then came sweeping 
down the hill to attack the English. 

The English, keeping side by side, in a great mass, cared 
no more for the showers of Norman arrows than if they 
had been showers of rain. When the Norman horsemen 
rode against them, with their battle-axes they cut men and 
horses down. The Normans gave way. The English 
pressed forward. A cry went forth among the Norman 
troops that William was killed. He took off his helmet, 
in order that his face might be seen, and rode along the 
line encouraging his men. As they turned again to face 
the English, some of their Norman horse divided the pur- 
suing body of the English from the rest, and thus all that 
foremost portion of the English army fell, fighting bravely. 
The main body still remaining firm, heedless of the Nor- 
man arrows, and with their battle-axes cutting down the 
crowds of horsemen when they rode up, William pre- 



46 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

tended to retreat. The eager English followed. The Nor- 
man army closed again, and fell upon them with great 
slaughter. 

"Still," said William, " there are thousands of the Eng- 
lish firm as rocks around their king. Shoot upward, that 
your arrows may fall down upon their faces." 

The sun rose high and sank, and the battle still raged. 
Through all that wild October day the clash and din re- 
sounded in the air. In the red sunset and in the white 
moonlight heaps of dead men lay strewed all over the 
ground. Harold, wounded with an arrow in the eye, was 
nearly blind. His brothers were already killed. Twenty 
Norman knights, whose battered armor had flashed fiery 
and golden in the sunshine all day long, and now looked 
silvery in the moonlight, dashed forward to seize the royal 
banner from the English knights and soldiers still faith- 
fully collected around their blinded king. The king re- 
ceived a mortal wound and dropped. The English broke 
and fled. The Normans rallied, and the day was lost. 

The victorious William pitched his tent near the spot 
where Harold fell, and he and his knights were carousing 
within ; and soldiers with torches sought for the corpse of 
Harold among piles of dead ; and the warrior, worked in 
golden thread and precions stones, lay low, all torn and 
soiled with blood ; and the three Norman lions kept watch 
over the field. 

Upon the ground where the brave Harold fell William 
the Norman afterwards founded an abbey, which, under 
the name of Battle Abbey, was a splendid place through 
many a troubled year, though now it is a gray ruin over- 
grown with ivy. But the first work he had to do was to 
conquer the English thoroughly, and that was hard work 
for any man. 

He ravaged several counties ; he burned and plundered 
many towns ; he laid waste scores upon scores of miles of 
pleasant country ; he destroyed innumerable lives. At 




William The Conqueror. 



(47) 



48 I1IST0RV OF ENGLAND. 

length the Archbishop of Canterbury, with other repre- 
sentatives of the clergy and the people, went to his camp, 
and submitted to him. Edgar, the son of Edmund Iron- 
side, was proclaimed king by others, but nothing came of 
it. He fled to Scotland afterwards, where his sister mar- 
ried the Scottish king. Edgar himself was not important 
enough for anybody to care much about him. 

On Christmas day William was crowned in Westmin- 
ster Abbey under the title of William I., but he is best 
known as William the Conqueror. When the crown was 
placed upon his head he swore to govern the English as 
well as the best of their own monarchs. 

Numbers of the English nobles had been killed in the 
last battle. Their estates William seized, and gave to his 
own Norman knights and nobles. Many great English 
families of the present time acquired their English lands 
in this way, and are very proud of it. 

But what is got by force must be maintained by force. 
These nobles were obliged to build castles all over Eng- 
land to defend their new property, but the king could 
neither soothe nor quell the nation as he wished. He 
gradually introduced the Norman language and the Nor- 
man customs, yet for a long time the great body of the 
English remained sullen and revengeful. On his going 
over to Normandy, to visit his subjects there, the oppres 
sions of his half-brother Odo, whom he left in charge of 
his English kingdom, drove the people mad. The men 
of Kent invited over Count Eustace of Boulogne to take 
possession of Dover. The men of Pereford, aided by the 
Welsh, and commanded by Edric the Wild, drove the 
Normans out of their country. Some of those who had 
been dispossessed of their lands banded together in the 
north of England, some in Scotland, some in the thick 
woods and marshes, and whensoever they could fall upon 
the Normans, or upon the English who had submitted to 
the Normans, they fought, despoiled and murdered, like 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 



49 



the desperate outlaws they were. Conspiracies were set 
on foot for a general massacre of the Normans, like the 




Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings. 

old massacre of the Danes. The English were in a mur- 
derous mood all through the kingdom. 

King William, fearing he might lose his conquest, came 
back and tried to pacify the London people by soft words. 
He then set forth to repress the country people by stern 

4 



50 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

deeds. Among the towns which lie besieged, and where 
he killed and maimed the inhabitants without any dis- 
tinction, sparing none, young or old, armed or unarmed, 
were Oxford, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, 
Lincoln, York. In all these places, and in many others, 
fire and sword worked their utmost horrors, and made the 
land dreadful to behold. Although William was a harsh 
and angry man, I do not suppose that he meant to work 
this shocking ruin when he invaded England. But what 
he had got by the strong hand he could only keep by the 
strong hand, and in so doing he made England a great 
grave. 

Two sons of Harold, by name Edmund and Godwin, 
came over from Ireland with some ships against the 
Normans, but were defeated. This was scarcely done 
when the outlaws in the woods so harassed York that 
the governor sent to the king for help. The king de- 
spatched a large force to occupy the town of Durham. 
The bishop of that place met the general outside the town 
and warned him not to enter, as he would be in danger 
there. The general cared nothing for the warning, and 
went in with all his men. That night, on every hill 
within sight of Durham, signal-fires were seen to blaze. 
When the morning dawned, the English, who had as- 
sembled in great strength, forced the gates, rushed into 
the town, and slew the Normans, every one. The English 
afterwards besought the Danes to come and help them. 
The Danes came with two hundred and forty ships. The 
outlawed nobles joined them ; they captured York, and 
drove the Normans out of that city. Then William bribed 
the Danes to go away, and took such vengeance on the 
English that all the former fire and sword, smoke and 
ashes, death and ruin, were nothing compared with it. 
In songs and doleful stories it was sung and told that 
there was not, from the river Humber to the river Tyne, 
one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated field— how 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 51 

there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human 
creatures and the beasts lay dead together. 

Very soon afterwards the king, victorious both in Scot- 
land and in England, quelled the last rebellious English 
noble. He then surrounded himself with Norman lords, 
enriched by the property of English nobles ; had a great 
survey made of all the land in England, which was en- 
tered as the property of its new owners on a roll called 
Doomsday-Book; obliged the people to put out their fires 
and candies at a certain hour every night, on the ringing 
of a bell which was called The Curfew ; introduced the 
Norman dresses and manners ; made the Normans mas- 
ters everywhere and the English servants; turned out the 
English bishops and put Normans in their places, and 
showed himself to be The Conqueror indeed. 

But even with his own Normans he had a restless life. 
They were always hungering and thirsting for the riches 
of the English, and the more he gave the more they 
wanted. His priests were as greedy as his soldiers. 

Beside all these troubles, William was troubled by quar- 
rels among his sons. He had three living — Robert, Will- 
iam (called Rufus, or the Red, from the color of his hair), 
and Henry (fond of learning, called Fine-Scholar). When 
Robert grew up he asked for Normandy, which he had 
nominally possessed, as a child, under his mother Ma- 
tilda. The king refusing to grant it, Robert became dis- 
contented and hotly departed with some followers, and 
endeavored to take the Castle of Rouen by surprise. Fail- 
ing in this, he shut himself up in another castle in Nor- 
mandy, which the king besieged, and where Robert one 
day nearly killed him without knowing who he was. His 
submission and the queen's intercession reconciled them, 
but not soundly, for Robert soon strayed abroad, and 
went from court to court with his complaints. He was a 
gay, careless, thoughtless fellow, spending all he got on 
musicians and dancers; but his mother loved him, and 



52 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

often, against the king's command, supplied him with 
money. 

All this time, from the turbulent day of his strange coro- 
nation, The Conqueror had been struggling, at any cost of 
cruelty and bloodshed, to maintain what he had seized. 
All his reign he struggled still, with the same object before 
him. He was a stern, bold man, and he succeeded in it. 

He loved money, and was particular in his eating; but 
he had only leisure to indulge one other passion, and that 
was his love of hunting. He carried it to such a height 
that he ordered whole villages and towns to be swept 
away to make forests for the deer. Not satisfied with 
sixty-eight royal forests, he laid waste an immense dis- 
trict to form another called the New Forest. The many 
thousands of miserable peasants who saw their little houses 
pulled down, and themselves and children turned into the 
open country without a shelter, detested him for his mer- 
ciless addition to their many sufferings ; and when, in the 
21st year of his reign, he went over to Rouen, England 
was as full of hatred against him as if every leaf on every 
tree in all his royal forests had been a curse upon his 
head. In the New Forest his son Richard (for he then had 
four sons) had been gored to death by a stag, and the 
people said that this so cruelly-made forest would yet be 
fatal to others of The Conqueror's race. 

He had a dispute with the King of France about some 
territory. While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with 
that king, he kept his bed and took medicines, on ac- 
count of having grown to an unwieldly size. Word being 
brought to him that the King of France joked about it, he 
swore in a great rage that he should rue his jests. He as- 
sembled his army, marched into the disputed territory, 
burnt the vines, the crops and fruit, and set the town of 
Nantes on fire — but in an evil hour ; for, as he rode over 
the hot ruins, his horse, setting his hoofs upon some burn- 
ing embers, started, threw him forward against the pom- 



WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 



53 



mel of the saddle, and gave him a mortal hurt. For six 
weeks he lay dying in a monastery near Rouen, and then 
made his will, giving England to William, Normandy to 




Burial of William The Conqueror. 



Robert, and five thousand pounds to Henry. And now 
his violent deeds lay heavy on his mind. He ordered 
money to be given to many English churches and mon- 
asteries, and — which was much better repentance— re- 



54 HISTORY OF EXGLAXD. 

leased his prisoners of state, some of whom had been con- 
fined in his dungeons twenty years. 

One morning the king was awakened by the sound of 
a church-bell. "What bell is that?" he faintly asked. 
They told him it was the bell of the chapel of Saint Mary. 
" I commend my soul," said he, " to Mary !" and died. 

Think of his name, The Conqueror, and then consider 
how he lay in death ! The moment he was dead, his phy- 
sicians, priests, and nobles, not knowing what contest for 
the throne might now take place, hastened away, each 
man for himself and his own property; the mercenary 
servants of the court began to rob and plunder ; the body 
of the king, in the indecent strife, was rolled from the bed, 
and lay alone for hours upon the ground. O Conqueror! 
of whom so many great names are proud now, of whom so 
many great names thought nothing then, it were better to 
have conquered one true heart than England. 

By and by the priests came creeping in with prayers 
and candles, and a good knight undertook to convey the 
body to Caen, in Normandy, in order that it might be 
buried in St. Stephen's Church there, which The Conqueror 
had founded. But fire, of which he had made such bad 
use in his life, seemed to follow him of itself in death. 
A great conflagration broke out in the town when the body 
was placed in the church, and those present running out 
to extinguish the flames, it was once again left alone. 

It was not even buried in peace. It was about to be let 
down in its royal robes into a tomb near the high altar, in 
presence of a great concourse of people, when a loud voice 
in the crowd cried out, " This ground is mine! Upon it 
stood my father's house. This king despoiled me of both 
ground and house to build this church. In the great name 
of God I here forbid tins body to be covered with the 
earth that is my right!" The bishops present, knowing 
the speaker's right, and that the king had denied him jus- 
tice, paid him dowm sixty shillings for the grave. Even 



WILLIAM II. 55 

then the corpse was not at rest. The tomb was too small, 
and they tried to force it in. It broke, a dreadful smell 
arose, the people hurried out into the air, and for the third 
time it was left alone. 

Where were The Conqueror's three sons, that they were 
not at their father's burial? Robert was lounging among 
minstrels, dancers and gamesters in France or Germany. 
Henry was carrying his five thousand pounds safely away 
in a chest he had made. William the Red was hurrying 
to England to lay his hands upon the royal treasure and 
the crown. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

WILLIAM II. 

William the Red, in breathless haste, secured the three 
great forts of Dover, Pevensey and Hastings, and made 
with hot speed for Winchester, where the royal treasure 
was kept. The treasurer delivering him the keys, he 
found sixty thousand pounds in silver, besides gold and 
jewels. Possessed of this wealth, he soon persuaded the 
Archbishop of Canterbury to crown him, and became Will- 
iam the Second, King of England. 

Rufus was no sooner on the throne than he ordered 
into prison again the unhappy state captives whom his 
father had set free, and ornamented his father's tomb pro- 
fusely with gold and silver. It would have been more 
dutiful in him to have attended the sick Conquerer when 
he was dying ; but England itself, like this Red King who 
once governed it, has sometimes made expensive tombs 
for dead men whom it treated shabbily when they were 
alive. 

The king's brother, Robert of Normandy, seeming quite 



56 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

content to be only duke of that country, and the king's 
other brother, Fine-Scholar, being quiet enough with his 
money, the king flattered himself with the hope of an 
easy reign. But easy reigns were difficult to have in those 
days. The turbulent Bishop Odo (who had blessed the 
Norman army at the battle of Hastings, and who took all 
the credit of the victory to himself) soon began, in concert 
with some powerful Norman nobles, to trouble the king. 

The truth seems to be that this bishop and his friends, 
who had lands in England and in Normandy, wished to 
hold both under one sovereign, and preferred the good- 
natured Robert to Rufus, who was keen and not to be im- 
posed upon. They declared in Robert's favor, and retired 
to their castles in a sullen humor. The Red King, seeing 
the Normans thus falling from him, revenged himself upon 
them by appealing to the English, to whom he promised 
to soften the cruelty of the forest laws, and who, in re- 
turn, so aided him that Odo was forced to depart from 
England forever; whereupon the other rebellious Norman 
nobles were soon reduced and scattered. 

Then the Red King went over to Normandy to seize 
upon the duke's dominions. This the duke prepared to 
resist, and war between the two brothers seemed inevita- 
ble, when the nobles on both sides interfered to prevent 
it. A treaty was made. Each of the two brothers agreed 
to give up something of his claims, and that the longer- 
lived of the two should inherit all the dominions of the 
other. When they had come to this loving understanding 
they joined their forces against Fine-Scholar, who had 
bought some territory of Robert with a part of his money, 
and was considered a dangerous individual in consequence. 

St. Michael's Mount in Normandy is a strong place, 
perched upon the top of a high rock, around which, when 
the tide is in, the sea flows, leaving no road to the main 
land. In this place Fine-Scholar shut himself up with his 
soldiers, and here he was closely besieged by his two 




William Kufus. 



(57) 



5 8 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

brothers. Fine-Scholar could not hold out against his 
united brothers, and he abandoned St. Michael and wan- 
dered about, as poor and forlorn as other scholars have 
been sometimes known to be. 

The Scotch became unquiet and were twice defeated — 
the second time with the loss of their king, Malcolm, and 
his son. The Welsh became unquiet, too. Against them 
Rums was less successful, for they fought among their 
native mountains, and did great execution to the king's 
troops. Robert of Normandy became unquiet, too, and 
complaining that his brother, the king, did not faithfully 
perform his part of their agreement, took up arms and ob- 
tained assistance from the King of France, whom Rufus, 
in the end, bought off with vast sums of money. 

The Red King was false of heart, selfish, covetous and 
mean. Once the king, being ill, became penitent, and 
made Anselm, a foreign priest and a good man, Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury. But he no sooner got well again 
than he repented of his repentance, and persisted in 
wrongfully keeping to himself some of the wealth belonging 
to the archbishopric. This led to violent disputes, which 
were aggravated by there being in Rome, at that time, two 
rival popes, each of whom declared he was the only real, 
original, infallible pope, who couldn't make a mistake. 
At last Anselm, not feeling safe in England, asked leave to 
return abroad. The Red King gladly gave it, for he knew 
that as soon as Anselm was gone he could begin to store 
up all the Canterbury money for his own use. 

By such means, and by taxing and oppressing the Eng- 
lish people in every possible way, the Red King became 
very rich. Having the opportunity of buying from Rob- 
ert the whole duchy of Normandy for five years, he taxed 
the English people more than ever, and made the very 
convents sell their plate and valuables to supply him with 
the means to make the purchase. Rut he was as quick and 
eager in putting down revolt as he was in raising money; 



WILLIAM II 59 

for, a part of the Norman people objecting to being sold in 
this way, he headed an army against them with all the 
speed and energy of his father. He was so impatient that 
he embarked for Normandy in a great gale of wind, and 
when the sailors told him it was dangerous to go to sea in 
such angry weather, he replied, " Hoist sail and away ! 
Did you ever hear of a king who was drowned ?" 

You will wonder how it was that even careless Robert 
came to sell his dominions. It happened thus : It had 
long been the custom for many English people to make 
pilgrimages to Jerusalem that they might pray beside the 
tomb of our Saviour there. Jerusalem belonging to the 
Turks, and the Turks hating Christianity, these travellers 
were often ill-used. The pilgrims bore it patiently for 
some time, but at length a man of great earnestness and 
eloquence, called Peter the Hermit, began to preach in 
various places against the Turks, and to declare that it was 
the duty of good Christians to drive away those unbelievers 
from the tomb of our Saviour, and to take possession of it 
and protect it. An excitement such as the world had 
never known before was created. Thousands of men, of 
all ranks and conditions, departed for Jerusalem to make 
war against the Turks. The war is called in history the 
First Crusade, and every Crusader wore a cross marked on 
his right shoulder. 

All the Crusaders were not zealous Christians. Among 
them were vast numbers of the restless, idle, profligate and 
adventurous spirits of the time. Some became Crusaders 
for the love of change; some in hope of plunder; some 
because they had nothing to do at home ; some because 
they did what the priests told them; some because they 
liked to see foreign countries ; some because they were 
fond of knocking men about, and would as soon knock a 
Turk about as a Christian. Robert of Normandy wanted 
to raise a number of armed men and go to the Crusade. 
He could not do so without money. He had no money. 



60 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

and he sold his dominions to his brother, the Red King, 
for five years. With the large sum thus obtained he fitted 
out his Crusaders gallantly, and went away to Jerusalem 
in martial state. The Red King, who made money out of 
everything, stayed at home, busily squeezing more money 
out of Normans and English. 

After three years of great hardship and suffering, from 
shipwreck at sea, from travel in strange lands, from hun- 
ger, thirst and fever, upon the burning sands of the desert 
and from the fury of the Turks, the valiant Crusaders got 
possession of our Saviour's tomb. The Turks were still 
resisting and fighting bravely, but this success increased 
the general desire in Europe to join the Crusade. Another 
great French duke was proposing to sell his dominions 
for a term to the rich Red King, when his reign came to a 
sudden and violent end. 

You have not forgotten the New Forest which The Con- 
queror made, and which the miserable people whose 
homes he had laid waste so hated. The cruelty of the 
forest laws, and the torture and death they brought upon 
the peasantry, increased this hatred. The poor country- 
people believed that the New Forest was enchanted. And 
now, in the pleasant season of May, when the Red King 
had reigned almost thirteen years, and a second prince of 
The Conqueror's blood — another Richard, the son of Duke 
Robert — was killed by an arrow in this dreaded forest, the 
people said that the second time was not the last, and that 
there was another death to come. 

The Red King, now reconciled to his brother, Fine- 
Scholar, came with a great train to hunt in the New For- 
est. Fine-Scholar was of the party, which was a merry 
one. The king took with him only Walter Tyrrel, who 
was a famous sportsman. 

The last time the king was ever seen alive he was riding 
with Tyrrel, and their dogs were hunting together. 

It was almost night when a poor charcoal-burner, pass- 



HENRY I. 61 

ing through the forest with his cart, came upon the solitary 
body of a dead man, shot with an arrow in the breast, and 
still bleeding. He got it into his cart. It was the body 
of the king. Shaken and tumbled, with his red beard all 
whitened with lime and clotted with blood, it was driven 
in the cart by the charcoal-burner, next day, to Winchester 
Cathedral, where it was received and buried. 

Tyrrel, who escaped to Normandy and claimed the pro- 
tection of the King of France, swore, in France, that the 
Red King was suddenly shot dead by an arrow from an 
unseen hand while they were hunting together ; that he 
was fearful of being suspected as the king's murderer, and 
fled to the sea-shore. 

By whose hand the Red King really fell is only known 
to God. Men know no more than that he was found dead 
in the New Forest, which the suffering people had regarded 
as a doomed ground for his race. 



CHAPTER IX. 

HENRY I. 



Fine-Scholar, on hearing of the Red King's death, hur- 
ried to Winchester with as much speed as Rums himself 
had made, and got hold of the royal treasure. On the 
third day after the death of the Red King, Fine-Scholar 
stood before the high altar in Westminster Abbey and 
made a solemn declaration that he would resign the 
Church property which his brother had seized, that he 
would do no wrong to the nobles, and that he would restore 
to the people the laws of Edward the Confessor, with all 
the improvements of William the Conqueror. So began 
the reign of King Henry I. 



62 // IS TO RY OF ENGLAND. 

The people were attached to their new king, because he 
was an Englishman by birth, and not a Norman. To 
strengthen this last hold upon them the king wished to 
marry an English lady, and selected Maud the Good, the 
daughter of the King of Scotland. This princess did not 
love the king, but thinking to unite the Norman and Saxon 
races, and prevent bloodshed between them for the future, 
she consented to become his wife. A good queen she was 
— beautiful, kind-hearted, and worthy of a better husband 
than the king, for he was a cunning and unscrupulous 
man, though firm and clever. He cared little for his word, 
and took any means to gain his ends. 

Before the king began to deal with his brother Robert 
he removed and disgraced all the favorites of the late king, 
who were for the most part base characters, much detested 
by the people. 

Now, Robert was absent in the Holy Land. Henry pre- 
tended that Robert had been made sovereign of that coun- 
try, and he had been away so long that the people believed 
it. But when Henry had been some time King of England 
Robert came home to Normandy, having leisurely returned 
from Jerusalem through Italy, where he had married a 
beautiful lady. In Normandy he found people waiting to 
urge him to assert his claim to the English crown and de- 
clare war against King Henry. This, after great loss of 
time, he did. 

The English in general were on King Henry's side, 
though many of the Normans were on Robert's. But the 
English sailors deserted the king and took a great part of 
the English fleet over to Normandy, so that Robert came 
to invade the country in English ships. Ansel m, whom 
Henry invited back and made Archbishop of Canterbury, 
was steadfast in the king's cause, and it was so well sup- 
ported that the two armies, instead of fighting, made a 
peace. Poor Robert, who trusted everybody, readily 
trusted his brother, the king, and agreed to go home and 




Henry I. 



(63) 



64 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

receive a pension from England, on condition that all his 
followers were pardoned. This the king promised, but 
Robert was no sooner gone than he began to punish them. 

Among them was the Earl of Shrewsbury, who, on being 
summoned by the king to answer to many accusations, 
shut himself up in one of his castles, called around him 
his tenants and vassals, and fought for his liberty, but was 
defeated and banished. Robert, with all his faults, was 
so true to his word that, when he first heard of this noble- 
man having risen against his brother, he laid waste Shrews- 
bury's estates in Normandy, to show the king that he 
would favor no breach of their treaty. Finding that the 
earl's only crime was having been his friend, he came over 
to England, in his old warm-hearted way, to intercede with 
the king and remind him of the promise to pardon all his 
followers. 

This confidence might have put the false king to the 
blush, but it did not. Pretending to be friendly, he so 
surrounded his brother with spies and traps that Robert, 
who was quite in his power, had nothing for it but to es- 
cape while he could. Getting home to Normandy, he 
allied himself with his old friend, the Earl of Shrewsbury, 
who had still thirty castles in that country. This was ex- 
actly what Henry wanted. He immediately declared that 
Robert had broken the treaty, and next year invaded 
Normandy. 

He pretended that he came to deliver the Normans, at 
their own request, from his brother's misrule. There is 
reason to fear that his misrule was bad enough. Robert 
headed his army like a brave prince and a gallant soldier, 
though he had the misfortune to be taken prisoner by 
King Henry, with four hundred of his knights. 

And Robert — poor, kind, generous, wasteful, heedless 
Robert, with so many faults, and yet with virtues that might 
have made a better and a happier man — what was the end 
of him ? Henry sentenced his brother to be confined for 



HENRY I. 65 

life in one of the royal castles. He was allowed to ride out 
guarded, but he one day broke away from his guard and 
galloped off. He had the evil fortune to ride into a swamp, 
where his horse stuck fast and he was taken. When the 
king heard of it he ordered him to be blinded, which was 
done by putting a red-hot metal basin on his eyes. 

One da}^ there lay in prison, dead, with cruel and dis- 
figuring scars upon his eyelids, bandaged from his jailer's 
sight, a worn old man of eighty. He had once been Rob- 
ert of Normandy. 

At the time when Robert was taken prisoner by his 
brother, Robert's little son was only five years old. The 
king was not accustomed to pity those who were in his 
power, but his cold heart seemed for a moment to soften 
towards the boy. He ordered the child to be taken away, 
whereupon a baron, who had married a daughter of Duke 
Robert's, took charge of him tenderly. The king's gentle- 
ness did not last long. Before two years were over he 
sent messengers to this lord's castle to seize the child and 
bring him away, but the boy was carried off and hid. The 
baron took the child abroad, and went from king to king, 
relating how the child had a claim to the throne of Eng- 
land, and how his uncle, the king, would have murdered 
him, but for his escape. 

When he became a man, the King of France supported 
his cause against the King of England, and took many of 
the king's towns and castles in Normandy. But Henry, 
artful and cunning always, bribed some of William's 
friends with money, some with promises, some with power. 
For all this, he was so afraid of William Fitz-Robert and 
his friends that for a long time he believed his life to be 
in danger, and never lay down to sleep without having a 
sword and buckler at his bedside. 

To strengthen his power, the king betrothed his eldest 
daughter, Matilda, then a child only eight years old, to be 
the wife of Henry the Fifth, the Emperor of Germany. To 

6 



66 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

raise her marriage portion he taxed the English people 
oppressively, then treated them to a great procession to 
restore their good humor, and sent Matilda away, in fine 
state, with the German ambassadors, to be educated in the 
country of her future husband. 

And now his queen, Maud the Good, unhappily died. 
At the time of her death Normandy and all France was 
in arms against England ; for, so soon as his last danger 
was over, Henr}' had been false to all the French powers 
he had promised, bribed and bought, and they had natu- 
rally united against him. After some fighting, in which 
few suffered but the unhappy people, he began to promise, 
bribe and buy again ; and by those means, and by the help 
of the pope, who exerted himself to save more bloodshed, 
and by solemnly declaring, over and over again, that he 
really was in earnest this time, and would keep his word, 
the king made peace. 

One of the first consequences of this peace was, that the 
king went over to Normandy with his son Prince William 
and a great retinue, to have the prince acknowledged as 
his successor by the Norman nobles, and to contract the 
promised marriage between him and the daughter of the 
Count of Anjou. Both these things were done with great 
show and rejoicing, and the whole retinue embarked at 
the Port of Barfleur for the voyage home. 

There were three hundred people in the gay company. 
The vessel was wrecked, and a poor butcher of Rouen 
alone was saved. In the morning some fishermen saw 
him floating in his sheepskin coat and got him into their 
boat — the sole relater of the dismal tale. 

For three days no one dared to carry the intelligence to 
the king. At length they sent into his presence a little 
boy, who, weeping bitterly, told him that the ship was lost, 
with all on board. The king fell to the ground like a dead 
man, and never afterwards was seen to smile. 

But he plotted again, and promised again, and bribed 



MATILDA AND STEPHEN. 67 

and bought again, in his old, deceitful way. Having no 
son to succeed him after all his pains, he took a second 
wife — Alice, a duke's daughter, and the pope's niece. 
Having no more children, he proposed to the barons to 
swear that they would recognize as his successor his 
daughter Matilda, whom, as she was now a widow, he 
married to the eldest son of the Count of Anjou, Geoffrey, 
surnamed Plantagenet, from a custom he had of wearing 
a sprig of flowering broom (called genet in French) in his 
cap for a feather. The barons took the oath about the 
succession of Matilda twice over, without in the least in- 
tending to keep it. The king was relieved from any fears 
of William Fitz-Robert by his death, in France ; and, as 
Matilda gave birth to three sons, he thought the succession 
to the throne secure. 

He spent most of the latter part of his life in Normandy, 
to be near Matilda. When he had reigned upwards of 
thirty-five years, and was sixty-seven years old, he died 
of an indigestion and fever. His remains were brought 
over to Reading Abbey to be buried. 

You may perhaps hear the cunning and promise-break- 
ing of King Henry I. called " policy " by some people, 
and " diplomacy " by others. Neither of these fine words 
will in the least mean that it was true ; and nothing that 
is not true can possibly be good. 

His greatest merit was his love of learning. He was 
avaricious, revengeful, and so false that a man never lived 
whose word was less to be relied upon. 



CHAPTER X. 

MATILDA AND STEPHEN. 



The king was no sooner dead than all the plans and 
schemes he had labored at so long, and lied so much for, 



6 8 HIS TOR Y OF ENG LA ND. 

crumbled away like a hollow heap of sand. Stephen, 
whom he had never mistrusted, claimed the throne. 

Stephen was the son of Henry's sister. To Stephen, and 
to his brother Henry, the late king had been liberal, 
making Henry Bishop of Winchester, and finding a good 
marriage for Stephen, and much enriching him. Stephen 
produced a servant of the late king to swear that the king 
had named him for his heir upon his death-bed. On this 
evidence the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned him. 
The new king lost not a moment in seizing the royal 
treasure, and hiring foreign soldiers with some of it to 
protect his throne. 

The dead king had, in fact, bequeathed all his territory 
to Matilda, who, supported by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, 
soon began to dispute the crown. Some of the powerful 
barons and priests took her side; some took Stephen's; 
all fortified their castles; and again the English people 
were involved in war, from which they could never derive 
advantage whosoever was victorious, and in which all par- 
ties plundered, tortured, starved and ruined them. 

Five years had passed since the death of Henry I. 
and during those five years there had been two terrible 
invasions by the people of Scotland under their King 
David, who was at last defeated with all his army— when 
Matilda, attended by her brother Robert and a large force, 
appeared in England to maintain her claim. A battle was 
fought between her troops and King Stephen's at Lincoln, 
in which the king himself was taken prisoner, after bravely 
fighting until his battle-axe and sword were broken, and 
was carried into strict confinement at Gloucester. Matilda 
then submitted herself to the priests, and the priests 
crowned her Queen of England. 

She did not long enjoy this dignity. The people of 
London had a great affection for Stephen ; many of the 
barons considered it degrading to be ruled by a woman, 
and the queen's temper was so haughty that she made 



MATILDA AND STEPHEN. 



69 



many enemies. The people of London revolted, and in 
alliance with the troops of Stephen besieged her at Win- 




The Escape of Queen Matilda. 

Chester, where they took her brother Robert prisoner, 
whom, as her chief general, she was glad to exchange for 



70 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Stephen, who thus regained his liberty. Then the long 
war went on afresh. Once she was pressed so hard in the 
Castle of Oxford, when the snow lay thick upon the 
ground, that her only chance of escape was to dress her- 
self all in white, and accompanied by three faithful knights 
dressed in like manner, that their figures might not be 
seen from Stephen's camp as they passed over the snow, 
to steal away on foot, cross the frozen Thames, walk a long 
distance, and at last gallop away on horseback. All this 
she did, but to no great purpose then ; for, her brother 
dying while the struggle was going on, she withdrew to 
Normandy. 

In two or three years her cause appeared afresh in the 
person of her son Henry, young Plantagenet, who, at 
eighteen years of age, was very powerful, not only on ac- 
count of his mother having resigned all Normandy to 
him, but also from his having married Eleanor, the di- 
vorced wife of the French king, a bad woman, who had 
great possessions in France. Louis, the French king, not 
relishing this arrangement, helped Eustace, King Ste- 
phen's son, to invade Normandy ; but Henry drove their 
united forces out of that country, and then returned to 
assist his partisans, whom the king was then besieging 
upon the Thames. Here for two days, divided only by the 
river, the two armies lay camped opposite to one another, 
on the eve, as it seemed, of another desperate fight, when 
Stephen and young Plantagenet went down, each to his 
own bank of the river, and held a conversation across it, 
in which they arranged a truce. The truce led to a solemn 
council at Winchester, in which it was agreed that Stephen 
should retain the crown on condition of declaring Henry 
his successor; that William, another son of the king's, 
should inherit his father's rightful possessions; and that 
all the crown lands which Stephen had given away should 
be recalled, and all the castles he had permitted to be 
built demolished. Thus terminated the bitter war, which 




Stephen. 



(71) 



72 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

had now lasted fifteen years, and had again laid England 
waste. In the next year Stephen died, after a troubled 
reign of nineteen years. 

Although Stephen was a humane and moderate man, 
with many excellent qualities, the people of England suf- 
fered more in these dread nineteen years than at any 
former period of their suffering history. In the division 
of the nobility between the two rival claimants of the 
crown, and in the growth of what is called the Feudal Sys- 
tem (which made the peasants the born vassals and mere 
slaves of the barons), every noble had his strong castle, 
where he reigned, the cruel king of all the neighboring 
people. Accordingly, he perpetrated whatever cruelties 
he chose; and never were worse cruelties committed 
upon earth than in wretched England in those nineteen 
years. 

In England there was no corn, no meat, no cheese, no 
butter ; there were no tilled lands, no harvests. Ashes of 
burnt towns and dreary wastes were all that the traveller 
would see, and from sunrise until night he would not 
come upon a home. 

The clergy suffered heavily, too, from pillage ; but many 
of them had castles of their own, and fought in helmet 
and armor like the barons, and drew lots with other fight- 
ing men for their share of booty. The pope, on Stephen's 
resisting his ambition, laid England under an interdict, 
which means that he allowed no service to be performed 
in the churches, no couples to be married, no bells to be 
rung, no dead bodies to be buried. 



CHAPTER XI. 

HENRY II. 

Henry Plantagenet, when twenty-one years old, 
quietly succeeded to the throne of England. Six weeks 
after Stephen's death he and his queen, Eleanor, were 
crowned in that city, into which they rode on horseback 
in great state, amid much rejoicing, clashing of music and 
strewing of flowers. 

The reign of King Henry II. began well. The king 
had great possessions, and (what with his own rights, 
and what with those of his wife) was lord of one-third part 
of France. He was a young man of vigor, ability and res- 
olution, and applied himself to remove some of the evils 
which had arisen in the last unhappy reign. He revoked 
all the grants of land made on either side during the late 
struggles; he obliged numbers of disorderly soldiers to 
depart from England ; he reclaimed all the castles belong- 
ing to the crown ; and he forced the wicked nobles to pull 
down 1100 of their own castles, in which dismal cruelties 
had been inflicted on the people. The king's brother, 
Geoffrey, rose against him in France. He repaired to that 
country, where, after he had subdued and made a friendly 
arrangement with his brother, his ambition to increase his 
possessions involved him in a war with the French king. 
However, the war came to nothing, and the pope made 
the two kings friends again. 

Now, the clergy in the troubles of the last reign had 
gone on very ill indeed. There were all kinds of crimi- 
nals among them — murderers, thieves, and vagabonds ; 
and the worst of the matter was, that the good priests 

(73) 



74 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

would not give up the bad priests to justice when they 
committed crimes, but persisted in sheltering and defend- 
ing them. The king, well knowing that there could be no 
peace while such things lasted, resolved to reduce the 
power of the clergy, and, when he had reigned seven 
years, found (as he considered) a good opportunity for 
doing so in the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
" I will have for the new archbishop," thought the king, 
" a friend in whom I can trust, who will help me to hum- 
ble these rebellious priests, and have them dealt with when 
they do wrong as other men who do wrong are dealt with." 

Thomas a Becket was the son of a Saxon peasant. The 
Archbishop of Canterbury took him into his service, 
caused him to take deacon's orders, made him archdeacon 
of his Church, and employed him in various negotiations 
with the Holy See. The king favored him, and he was 
raised to the office of Chancellor of England. He gave 
him the wardenship of the Tower, and placed in his hands 
the care and education of the heir to the throne. These 
appointments yielded large revenues, which were spent by 
Becket in the greatest luxury and magnificence. The 
chancellor went on an embassy to Paris, and was attended 
by many barons and lords and a large body of knights 
and attendants. His passage through France resembled 
a triumphal procession, and caused the people to ask, with 
wonder, what manner of man the King of England must 
be when his chancellor travelled in such magnificence. 

During the period of his chancellorship his influence 
with the king was used in promoting reforms and insti- 
tuting measures which were calculated to promote the wel- 
fare of the people. Although a churchman, he did not 
hesitate to attack the extravagant pretensions of the 
bishops. 

" I will make," thought Henry, " this chancellor of 
mine, Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Being devoted 
to me, he will help correct the Church. He once publicly 




(75) 



76 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

told some bishops that men of the Church were equally 
bound to me with men of the sword. Becket is the man 
to help me in my great design." So he was made arch- 
bishop accordingly. 

Now, Becket was proud and loved to be famous. He 
was already famous for the pomp of his life ; he longed 
to have his name celebrated for something else. Nothing, 
he knew, would render him so famous as the setting of 
his power and ability against the power and ability of the 
king. 

In all his sumptuous life he had never yet been in a 
position to disappoint the king. He could take up that 
proud stand now as head of the Church, and he deter- 
mined that it should be written in history either that he 
subdued the king or that the king subdued him. 

Becket knew better than anyone in England what the 
king expected of him. But he and the king came to war 
on Church matters; he thought his life wns in danger and 
he fled. The strife between them kept up for six years, 
when Henry wanted his son for his Viceroy in England. 
No one but the archbishop, Becket claimed, had the right 
to crown the king, but Henry got the Bishop of York to 
do it. This brought on him the anger of the pope and of 
Louis VII. of France, who took up Becket's cause. The 
king gave in at last, and Becket came back, and the people 
were glad, for they looked on him as a good and wise man 
who had not been dealt right with. He was firm, and got 
a bill from the pope which took away the office from the 
Bishop of York. 

Henry flew into one of his fits of rage and said, u What 
cowards have I brought up in my court ! No one will de- 
liver me from this low-born priest!" Four of his knights 
took him at his word and slew Becket in his own church, 
in which he sought safety. Henry was horror-stricken, 
and cleared himself with the pope and made oath that he 
had no share in the murder. 




The Murder op Becket. 



(77) 



78 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Henry's life was clouded with strife with his sons, 
among whom he wished to divide his lands. Henry, the 
young king, was to have England, Normandy and Anjou. 
Richard got his mother's lands in Aquitaine and Poitou. 
Geoffrey got the Duchy of Brittany by his marriage with 
its heir, Constance. This left John out in the cold, and 
the king asked his sons to give him some of their castles 
and lands. Young Henry refused, and those who wished 
ill to the king stirred up strife, and the three elder sons 
rose up against their father. Round them flocked Louis 
of France and the King of Scotland and all the barons 
who felt sore. 

Henry looked on this as caused by the Divine wrath at 
the murder of Becket ; so he let himself be scourged be- 
fore the saint's tomb, as Becket was styled. 

The king acted quickly, and soon put down the revolt. 
No one met with a hard fate but the King of Scotland, 
who had to admit English troops in the castles of the Low- 
lands. Henry's two elder sons were soon once more at 
war with him, but in 1183 the young king died, begging 
his father to forgive him. Geoffrey was pardoned, but did 
not get on well, and died in 1186. Richard, in 1188, 
sought the help of Philip of France and invaded his 
father's foreign lands. Henry, who was now old and in 
poor health, bowed to the demands of his foes. He asked 
for a list of the barons who had joined Richard, and the 
first name he heard was that of his son John. He turned 
his face to the wall and cried, " Now let all things go 
what way they may; I care no more for myself nor for 
the world." 

In the early part of his reign Henry got word from 
Pope Hadrian IV. (the only Englishman that was ever 
made pope) that he might take Ireland. He sent over 
some troops with Dermond, a king who had fled from Ire- 
land, and Richard of Clare, called " Strongbow." They 
took the land. Dermond died, and Strongbow, who had 



MCHARD t 79 

wed his daughter, claimed the chief rule, but he was 
afraid of Henry and thought it best to give up Dublin and 
to hold his Irish lands as a vassal of the English crown. 
Henry went to Ireland in 1171, and was regarded as king 
and ruler. 

Henry told his attendants to take him to the French 
town of Chinon — a town he had been fond of during many 
years. But he was fond of no place now ; it was too true 
that he could care for nothing more upon this earth. He 
wildly cursed the hour when he was born, and cursed the 
children whom he left behind him and expired, after gov- 
erning England well for nearly thirty-five years. 

As, a century before, the followers of the court had 
abandoned The Conqueror in the hour of his death, so they 
now abandoned his descendant. The very body was 
stripped, in the plunder of the royal chamber, and it was 
not easy to find the means of carrying it for burial to the 
abbey-church of Fontevraud. 

Richard was said to have the heart of a lion. It would 
have been far better had he possessed the heart of a man. 
His heart, whatever it was, had cause to beat remorsefully 
within his breast when he looked on his dead father's un- 
covered face. His heart had been a black and perjured 
heart in all its dealings with the deceased king, and more 
deficient in a single touch of tenderness than any wild 
beast's in the forest. 



CHAPTER XII. 

RICHARD I. 

Richard of the Lion-Heart succeeded to the throne. 
He was a tall, stout man, ruddy and brown-haired, 
liked fine things and show in dress. He was fond of war, 



80 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

and his great strength and pluck fitted him to win. He 
was fierce and rash, and as a Crusader he was full of zeal 
for the faith. He cared nothing for the English, but 
wanted the gold the land brought to him, and in his whole 
reign he was but twice in the country, and at each time 
but for a short while. 

To raise the money that brought him and his bands to 
the East he sold honors, offices, church lands, and to the 
King of Scots release from all that Henry II. had laid on 
him. " I would sell London if I could rind a buyer," he 
said. 

He, with Philip of France, set out for the Holy Land, 
but ere they got there their love and good-will had cooled. 
These rows ruined the Crusade. Philip went home and 
tried to get hold of Richard's lands. Other leaders found 
fault with Richard's harsh ways, and he with their lack 
of zeal. He was forced to make a truce with Sal ad in, the 
Sultan of Egypt and Syria. His ill-luck had been a 
great grief to him. When he got a sight of the Holy Land 
he covered his face with his hand and begged God not to 
let him see it, since he could not take it. The Crusade 
checked the rule of the great Saladin, and thus was not 
quite a failure. 

In this reign England was ruled by the king's justiciars. 
Of these, William, of Longchamp, was chancellor. He 
was not liked by the nobles, and he hated the English, 
whose speech he could not learn. He was removed, and 
the king's brother John was made regent and heir to the 
crown. 

Richard set out for home, but was made captive in Aus- 
tria, and John swore he was dead and laid claim to the 
crown. 

The king in his haste to get home left his fleet and came 
on foot. In Austria he was seized by Leopold, the duke 
of that land, with whom he had quarrelled in the times 
of the Crusade. The duke sold him to Henry VI., who, 




ElCHARD I. 



(81) 



82 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

to do Philip of France a good turn, kept him loaded with 
chains. Henry VI. gave him up for a ransom that was so 
large that to raise it each Englishman gave up a fourth 
of his goods, and the Church plate and jewels were taken 
to make up the sum. When he was freed Philip wrote to 
John, " Take care of yourself, for the devil is let loose." 
Richard took away the lands and castles from John, but 
gave him back the lands, though he would not trust him 
with the castles. 

The rest of Richard's life was spent in war with Philip. 
In April, 1199, the king died in a battle he had with one 
of his barons, who had found a large lot of gold on some 
of his lands. The king called for this gold, but the baron 
would give up but the half of it. So the king went to war, 
stormed and took the castle, and ordered all the troops to 
be hanged. He was shot in the back by a young archer, 
whom he forgave on his death-bed, but who was killed by 
his troops after his death. He was wed, but left no heirs. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

KING JOHN. 

At thirty-two years of age John became King of Eng- 
land. His nephew, Arthur, had the best claim to the 
throne, but John seized the treasure and got himself 
crowned at Westminster. I doubt whether the crown 
could possibly have been put upon the head of a meaner 
coward or a more detestable villain if England had been 
searched from end to end to find him out. 

The French king, Philip, refused to acknowledge the 
right of John to the throne, and declared in favor of Ar- 
thur. So John and the French king went to war about 
Arthur. 




King John. 



(83) 



84 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

In a battle Arthur was thrown into John's hands, and 
lie wanted Hubert, of Burg, to blind the boy. Hubert 
would not put his eyes out, and it is said John stabbed 
him with his own hands. Philip ordered John to clear 
himself of this stain before the French Peers, and when 
he did not he was said to have forfeited his fiefs. So 
Philip took Normandy and the lands around it. To Eng- 
land these losses proved a gain. The kings became Eng- 
lishmen, and not mere French princes who held England. 

John got into a row with Pope Innocent II. on the 
right of the monks to elect the archbishop. John claimed 
thai the bishops had a voice in the matter. The pope 
sided with the monks, and had them elect Stephen Lang- 
ston, an Englishman who then lived in Rome, and the 
first scholar of his day. John named some one else for 
the place, and refused to receive Langston. The pope 
then laid the land under an interdict. 

John defied the pope and took away the lands from the 
priests who observed the interdict. Then the pope ex- 
communicated him and declared him deposed from his 
throne, and called on Philip of France and all Christian 
nobles and knights to join in a holy war against him. 
Then John's pluck failed him. His harsh laws had set 
high and low against him, and he felt he could not de- 
pend on his subjects. 

Peter, a hermit, had said that when the next Ascension 
day had passed John would have ceased to reign. John 
grew afraid, brought in Stephen, and by a charter granted 
to the pope the lands of England and Ireland, to be held 
by John and his heirs by a yearly tribute, and swore 
fealty to Innocent. In a week the feast of the Ascension 
had passed, and John had the hermit hanged for a false 
prophet. The people said Peter had spoken true — John 
was no longer a king, but a vassal. 

The barons now made up their minds to put a check on 
John's harsh rule. They brought out the old charter of 



KING JOHN. 85 

Henry L, which was heard with great joy by all present, 
who saw in it a law for the good things they desired. In 
the next year the barons took an oath on the altar to 
withdraw their aid and help to John if he still held out 
and refused their demands. John sent out for aid, but 
the news came back that no man would help him against 
the charter. At Easter the barons came once more to 
press their claims. " Why don't you ask for my king- 
dom ?" cried John, in a burst of rage. He swore he would 
not grant them liberties that would make him a slave, but 
the whole land rose when he refused. Nursing wrath in 
his heart, the tyrant bowed to the need and called the 
barons to a talk at Runnymede. 

An isle in the Thames had been chosen as the place to 
meet. The king camped on one side and the barons took 
the other side. The talk was a mere cloak to cover John's 
plans of unconditional surrender. The Great Charter was 
discussed, agreed to and signed in a-single day. 

One copy of it can still be seen in the British Museum, 
injured by age and fire, but with the seal still hanging 
from the brown, shrivelled parchment. Here you can see 
with your own eyes, and touch with your own hands, the 
Great Charter to which from age to age patriots have looked 
back as the basis of English liberty. 

The worst of the bad acts were at once swept away, the 
hostages restored to their homes, and the people who did 
not belong to the land were sent off. But it was hard to 
find means to hold in check a king whom no man could 
trust. 

John went for aid to the pope, who told the barons the 
charter'was of no effect. He then hired troops and fell 
on the barons. He starved them out in some places, and 
ravaged the midland towns. This drove the barons to 
seek aid from France, and they said they would make 
Philip's son, Louis, their king. Louis landed at Kent 
with a large force, and the hired French troops of John 



86 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

left him at once. Louis entered London and the city- 
bowed to his yoke. John marched to the North ; in cross- 
ing the Wash his baggage and treasure were washed away. 
A fever now seized him, and he entered Newark only to 
die, leaving behind him an evil name. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

HENRY III. 

The dead usurper's eldest boy, Henry, w r as taken to the 
city of Gloucester, and there crowned when he was only 
ten years old. As the crown itself had been lost with the 
king's treasure, they put a circle of plain gold upon his 
head instead. " We have been the enemies of this child's 
father," said Pembroke, a good and true gentleman, to the 
few lords who were present, "and he merited our ill-will ; 
but the child himself is innocent, and his youth demands 
our friendship and protection.'' Those lords felt tenderly 
towards the little boy, and they bowed their heads and 
said, " Long live King Henry III !' 

Next, a council met at Bristol, revised Magna Charta, 
and made Lord Pembroke Regent or Protector of England, 
as the king was too young to reign alone. The next thing 
to be done was to get rid of Prince Louis of France, and 
to win over those English barons who were still ranged 
under his banner. 

The story of Henry's reign is for a long time one of 
strife against foreign sway. The horde who were in John's 
service still had a deal to say and do in the land, till they 
were got rid of by Hubert of Burg, who, when the Earl 
of Pembroke died, came to the front and ruled the land 
for Henry till he lost the king's good-will. Then, when 
twenty-nine years old, Henry took to wife Eleanor of Pro- 




Henry III. 



(87) 



88 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

vence. She was not liked, for she gave freely to her kin, 
who looked on England as a mine of wealth out of which 
they were glad to get as much as they could. 

The king had no bad faults, but he was weak and vain, 
and liked to be seen giving gifts, and so he was always 
poor and greedy for money. When his first son, Edward, 
was born he sought gifts from all who were near him. 
The rich men of London spoke hard of the tax laid upon 
them. They were no friends of the court, and their hatred 
often broke out. The barons forced Henry to form a Par- 
liament of twenty-four men, half to be named by him and 
half to be fixed on by them. But this new rule did not 
work long. They fought amongst themselves, and Henry 
then grabbed the chance to try to get back his own rule. 

This ended in a war between Henry and the barons, 
who were led by Simon of Montfort, a Frenchman, who 
had obtained the Earldom of Leicester, on which his 
people held a claim, had wed the king's sister Eleanor, 
and who had grown to be an out-and-out Englishman. 
He was a brave man, rash at times, but skilled in war and 
rule. The king, who made him all that he was, soon fell 
out with him, and Simon stood forth as the head of the 
band that looked for a change. The priests thought well 
of him, and so did the people of the towns, and he was 
well liked in London, where the king and his court was 
disliked. When the war at last broke out the queen tried 
to pass down from the Tower to Windsor. The Londoners 
pelted her with mud and tried to sink her boat, and forced 
her to go back. The fight at Lewes, in 1264, put an end 
for a time to the war. Edward, the king's son, charged 
on the Londoner's with dash and pluck and routed them. 
He chased them for miles, and while he was killing them 
his own friends were defeated by Simon. King Henry 
fought well, but was forced to give in, and though treated 
with respect, he was in fact a captive and Simon was the 
real ruler. 



HENRY III. 



89 



The great act of Simon, while he ruled, was to summon 
a Parliament in Henry's name, to which men from the 
towns were called. The great barons, out of whom, in 
these days, the House of Lords, or Peers, was formed, came, 




Death of Henry III. 

as they still do, in person, and as the small freeholders 
were too many to do the same, a few of their number came 
to act for them — so many knights from each county. 
Simon brought the towns in by having each city and 
borough send two of its citizens. Simon's was not what 
we would call a full and free Parliament. The number 



90 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

of earls and barons was small, only those being called 
who were friends of his. On the other hand, there was a 
large body of clergy, as amongst this class his friends were 
many. 

Simon " The Righteous," as he was called, did not 
hold his sway long. His sons brought him into 
trouble. Edward escaped, and, with the Earl of Glouces- 
ter, whipped Simon's son at Kenilworth. They then 
marched against the elder Simon at Eversham, who gave 
up the fight, saying, " Now, let us commend our souls to 
God, for our bodies are theirs." He fought to the end, 
and was killed by a blow from behind. His corpse was 
mangled, but some parts of it were buried by the monks 
of Eversham, and the clergy and people looked on him as 
a martyr. The fight brought Henry back to power. 

The land at peace, Edward and Edmund set out on 
what proved to be the last Crusade, and while they were 
gone King Henry died. He was buried in Westminster 
Abbey, which he had rebuilt, and ere his grave was closed 
the Earl of Gloucester placed his hand on the corpse and 
swore fealty to the absent Edward, who was at once de- 
clared king. 



CHAPTER XV. 

EDWARD I. 

Edward, the first English prince after the Norman con- 
quest, who was an Englishman at heart, was strong and 
tall, a good horseman, and fond of the hunt. He could 
hold his own in a hand-to-hand fight, and never grudged 
to take his share of the hardships of war. In a fight in 
Wales, when he and his men ran short of food, he refused 
to have some wine kept for his own use. " In times of 



EDWARD I. 



91 



need all things ought to be shared," he said. " I, who am 
the cause of your being in this strait, will fare the same 
as you all." He was a good soldier. He ruled the realm 
well and wisely. He loved to rule, and was loath to give 
it up, but he knew when to yield ; his chief fault was that 










5©tf 



Attempted Assassination of Edward I. 



he would strain his legal rights, and keep to the letter of 
the law rather than to its spirit. 

When Edward came to the throne the Prince of Wales 
was called on to do homage. This he evaded for a long 
time, but he was at length looked on as a rebel, and 
brought by force of arms to } r ield. For some time there 
was peace, but the prince and his people still hoped to 



92 BISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

win their freedom. The prince lost his life in a fight, and 
his brother, David, was put to death as a traitor. 

When the king's son Edward was sixteen years old he 
was created Prince of Wales, a name since that time 
usually given to the king's first son. 

The Scots included all the people north of the Tweed 
and Solway, and had no king, but there was a crowd of 
men who claimed it. Of these, the best known are John 
Baliol and Robert Bruce, both of Norman blood, who held 
lands in England and Scotland, and rested their claims 
on their descent from nieces of William the Lion. Ed- 
ward was called on to say who should be king, and he 
settled on Baliol, but made him acknowledge him as head 
king. There was a fight between France and England, 
and the Scots sided with France. In this they were 
worsted, and Baliol was forced to give up the crown to 
Edward, who brought away the Scotch crown jewels and 
with them a relic whose Joss was deeply felt. At Scone 
there was a piece of rock on which the Scotch king stood 
when he was crowned. It was said where that stone was 
the Scotch kings should reign. Edward placed it on a 
throne in Westminster Abbey, where the stone and chair 
still are seen, and on them all the Kings of England have 
since been crowned. 

Edward did not treat the Scotch harshly, but Southern 
rule was hated by them. Wallace, a chief of outlaws, 
headed a new rising and whipped the English at Stirling. 
He then ravaged Northumberland and Cumberland, and 
was made ruler of Scotland. His fall was as rapid as his 
rise. Edward routed his foes at Talkirk, and Wallace 
sank once more to his outlaw's life, Edward called on him 
to bow to the king's mercy. This he disdained to do. He 
was captured, brought to London, and hanged at Tyburn. 
He gained by his death the martyr's crown. What he 
failed to do was brought about by Robert Bruce, who had 
claimed the throne. Calling the Scots around him, he 




Edward I. 



(93) 



94 HISTOR Y OF ENGL A ND. 

had himself crowned at Scone. Edward was now in poor 
health and had to move slowly. He sent his son Edward 
to fight the Scots, and he burned and wasted the whole 
land, and the king had to check him for his cruel deeds. 
Bruce was hunted from place to place, but he gained some 
few small fights. Edward marched from Carlisle as soon 
as his health let him, but he died in sight of Scotland. 

The Jews were hated by the people, and Edward ordered 
them all out of the kingdom on pain of death. They were 
let take with them their money and goods. Harsh as 
was this order, it is but fair to Edward to say that he cut 
off a great source of revenue in thus acting up to the 
wishes of his people. 

Edward had four sons by Eleanor, his first wife. All 
but the youngest, Edward, died in their youth. The 
king's next wife, Margaret, sister of Philip IV. of France, 
had two sons — Thomas, Earl of Norfolk, and Edward, 
Earl of Kent. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

EDWARD II. 

King Edward II. , the first Prince of Wales, was twenty- 
three years old when his father died. The young king 
had a friend, called Piers, who had been chosen for him 
in his youth by his father — who had cause to rue his 
choice. Piers was sent off before the king died, and the 
young Edward was told not to bring him back, and to go 
on with the war with the Scots. But he paid no heed to 
these wishes. He wed Isabel, the daughter of Philip IV. 
of France. Piers was brought back, and the Scotch war 
dragged. The bishops, earls and barons took the rule 
from the king for a year and Piers was cleared off again. 
He came back to the king and was captured in a fight, and 
his head was cut off. 




Edvvakd II. 



(95) 



96 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

While Edward was at strife with his barons Scotland 
was lost — all the forts there fell into the hands of Bruce. 
Edward, with a large force, set out to take Stirling Castle. 
The fight took place at Bannockburn, where Bruce and his 
small force cut up the English and sent them fleeing over 
the plain. Edward fled and all his wealth fell into the 
hands of the Scots, who bad now gained their freedom, 
though it was long before the English would treat Bruce 
as king. 

Edward Bruce, a brother of Robert, went to Ireland with 
a force. He gained some small fights and was crowned 
king. Two years later he fell in a fight. Edward was 
now at strife for a long time with his people. Thomas was 
taken in a fight and his head cut off in his own castle. 

Charles IV. of France got up a row with Edward, who 
sent his wife and son over to France, thinking that she 
could bring her brother to make terms for him. She re- 
mained in France for a long time, and when she came 
back she had with her a band of troops. In the fights 
that followed Edward was captured and forced to give up 
the crown to his son. He yielded with tears, and was 
confined in Kenilworth Castle. 

One night dreadful screams were heard by the startled 
people, ringing through the thick walls of the castle, and 
they said, " May Heaven be merciful to the king, for those 
cries forebode that no good is being done to him in his 
dismal prison !' ' Next morning he was dead — not bruised 
or stabbed, or marked upon the body, but much distorted 
in the face; and it was whispered afterwards that he had 
been burnt to death with a red-hot iron. Mortimer, the 
queen's lover, said he ordered the deed done. 

If you ever go near Gloucester, and see the centre 
tower of its beautiful cathedral, you may remember that 
the wretched Edward II. was buried in the old abbey of 
that ancient city when forty-three years old, after being 
for nineteen years and a half a perfectly incapable king. 




ROBERT BRUCE. 



(97) 



CHAPTER XVII. 

EDWARD III. 

As the new king was only fourteen years old, guardians 
were made to rule the land, hut the queen and Mortimer 
managed to get all the power in their own hands. They 
had wars with the Scots but were whipped in all of them, 
and when they made a peace the English scorned them. 
By this time Edward was eighteen years old and his own 
master. He took Mortimer a captive and had him con- 
demned, with no hearing, and his head was cut off. Isabel 
passed the rest of her life in ward at Castle Rising. 

On the death of Charles IV. of France Edward put in 
a claim to the throne, in right of his mother. This 
claim was not allowed by the French, who claimed that 
women by the " Salic law " were shut out from the throne. 
Philip, the real king of France, helped the Scots in their 
fights with England, and Edward brought up his old claim 
once more, and this brought on " The Hundred Years' 
War.' 1 They were not, of course, fighting all this time, 
but there was no settled peace for all that time. Edward's 
first great fight was one at sea. There-were six years more 
of war and truce, when he gained the great battle at Crecy, 
August 26, 1346. The French had more troops than the 
English, but they were ill-led. Philip, wild with rage and 
grief, got off to Amiens. It is said that Edward used can- 
non in this battle, with good effect. 

Edward blockaded by sea and land the town of Calais, 

and the troops there were starved into surrender. He 

wanted to kill all of them, but his queen begged their 

lives and they were spared. He placed a colony of Eng- 

(98) 




Edwabd III. 



(99) 



100 HISTOR Y OF ENG LAND. 

lish in the town and they remained there for two hundred 
years. A truce was fixed up by Pope Clement VI. While 
Edward was in France the Scots rose up and invaded 
England but were whipped, and their king, David Bruce, 
was captured. 

Edward now stood at the height of his fame. The Eng- 
lish had learned to think they could beat the French at 
any time. The spoils of France were to be seen in every 
house. 

In 1348 and 1349 a great plague, called the "black 
death " swept through Europe, and killed more than half 
of the people in England. Men to till the soil were scarce, 
and wages were high. The king and his Parliament tried 
to force men to work for their old hire, and did not let 
them move out of their own place. 

The French war came again, and the chief work was 
done by young Edward, known as the "Black Prince" 
from the color of the armor he wore at Crecy. The French 
were whipped all around by the English, who plundered 
the French towns and stole spoil by the load. 

John the Good, the King of France, was taken captive 
to London. He paid three million gold crowns for his 
ransom, and Edward gave up his claim to the throne of 
France, but kept Poitou, Aquitaine and Calais. 

The Black Prince took the part of Dom Pedro, who had 
been cast out from Castile, and won back his lands and 
rule for him. Pedro broke his word to pay Edward for his 
expenses, and he came back with his health ruined, his 
temper spoiled and his bank drained out. To raise gold 
he put on a hearth tax, and the Aquitaine's turned to 
Charles V., the French king, and war broke out once more. 
The prince rallied his strength, but his last act — the kill- 
ing of all the townspeople in Limoges — has left a stain on 
his good name. He came back to England, and, wearied 
out, he sued for a truce. 

The king's third son, John, Duke of Lancaster, called, 




THE BLACK PRINCE AND KING JOHN. ( 101 ) 



102 



HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



from his birthplace, John of Ghent, or Gaunt, now took 
the lead at home. Young Edward was dying and the 
elder Edward was old and feeble. Gaunt called bad men 
around him, and was at last removed from his trust by the 
Parliament, which was helped by the Black Prince, and 
which gained the name of " the good." 




Death of Edward III. 



On June 8, 1376, the Black Prince died, and great was 
the grief of the land for him who had won them fame 
abroad and strove with his last strength to save them from 
bad laws at home. He was buried at Canterbury Cathe- 
dral, where his helmet, shield, gauntlets, and his great- 
coat with the arms of England and France on it, still hang 
above his tomb. John of Gaunt now came back and had 
things his own way. 



RICHARD II. 103 

In his last moments Edward was forsaken by all his 
friends and servants. One priest came to his bedside and 
gave him a cross. He kissed it, and died. In the after 
years his fame stood high. In his own days, though he 
was thought well of as a war king, the people at large had 
no great love for him. His sons were Edward, Prince of 
Wales; Lionel, Duke of Clarence; John, Duke of Lan- 
caster; Edward, Duke of York; and Thomas, Duke of 
Gloucester. This title of duke, the highest in the peerage, 
was first made by Edward III. He founded the Order of 
the Knights of the Garter, and rebuilt a great part of 
Windsor Castle. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

EICHARD IT. 

Richard, son of the Black Prince, was made king at the 
age of eleven. His reign was one of trouble. When the 
"black death" came and carried off the men who tilled 
the soil, a law was passed which fixed their wages at a 
rate the men refused to take. Riots were common. Men 
like Wat Tyler started up to lead the mobs. One hundred 
thousand of them marched from Kent to London, where 
they broke into the prisons and set free the captives. 
They burned John of Gaunt's palace, and the Temple, 
with all its books, and killed all the Flemish workmen 
they could find. But no one took spoils. " We will not 
be thieves," they said, as they flung Lancaster's jewels 
into the Thames. Wat Tyler, their chief, was stabbed 
while talking with Richard, who then rode to the front of 
the mob and said he would be their leader. He got them 
to give way by his promise to grant their demands. 

Richard was noted for his good looks. But he was able, 



104 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

and could, when he wanted to, act with quickness and 
pluck. He was fond of shows, and his temper was bad at 
times. In 1388 the party against the king was headed by 
Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, who got the upper-hand, 
when death or flight was meted out to all of Richard's 
friends. The Parliament which condemned them was 
known as " the merciless." The next year Richard, with 
sudden pluck, took the reins in his own hands, and for 
eight years he ruled well, though he did not forgive those 
who took part in the acts of 1388. His first wife died, 
and two years later he wed a child of eight years — Isabel, 
daughter of Charles VI. of France. 

This step w T as not liked, as the English had no wish to 
be friendly with France, and it was strongly fought by 
Gloucester, who was seized the next year and hurried off 
to Calais, where he soon died — murdered, it was thought. 
Richard had got the best of all his foes, and had a Parlia- 
ment devoted to him, so that there was no check on him. 

Of the nobles who had sided against him only two were 
left, and they had come to the king's side and were restored 
to favor. These were Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, 
and Henry, Duke of Hereford, sons of John of Gaunt. 

Hereford said Norfolk had slandered the king. Norfolk 
denied the charge, and they were to fight it out, when the 
king stopped the fight and sent Hereford off for ten years 
and Norfolk for life. John of Gaunt lived but a short 
while after his sons were sent off, and his lands, which 
should have passed to Hereford, were taken by Richard. 

Richard went over to Ireland and Hereford came back 
to England. He was joined by the heads of all the great 
houses in the North. His troops swelled to sixty thousand 
men, and Edward, Duke of York, who acted as regent, in 
place of fighting Hereford ended by taking up his cause. 

Richard in Ireland heard no news of his landing for 
two weeks, and then he could not make up his mind what 
to do. At last he landed in Wales, but his troops fell off 




.Richard IT. 



(105) 



106 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

from him. He was induced to leave his place of refuge, 
and was brought captive to Hereford, who took him to 
London, where he gave up the crown. 

On this, Henry of Lancaster claimed the crown, as 
being the heir of Henry III., and he was led to the throne 
on which he was placed amid the shouts of the people 
who filled Westminster. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

HENRY IV. 

Henry was in fact an elected king, but claimed a vested 
right as a descendant of Henry III. 

By the Act of the Lords Richard was consigned to a 
secret cell for life, and none knew where he was. Some 
nobles took up arms in his favor. They were soon 
crushed, and Richad's dead body was brought to London, 
where it was shown in St. Paul's and then buried at 
Langley. Some said he had been killed; some said 
starved. Some declared this was not Richard's body, and 
that he was alive in Scotland. 

Henry had not been long on the throne when the Welsh 
rose in arms. They were led by Glendower, who spread 
terror amongst the English. The Welsh in England 
flocked to join this chief, against whom Henry led his 
troops in vain. Glendower would hie to his hills, and let 
his foes fight the wind, and wet, and the dangers of a wild 
and rugged land. 

Henry's great friends were the Percys — the Earl of Nor- 
thumberland, his brother Thomas, Earl of Worcester, and 
his son, Sir Henry, who had spent his life in fights with 
the Scots, by whom he was called " Harry Hotspur," be- 



108 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

cause he was always in the saddle, and his spear was never 
cold. He and his father routed the Scotch at Homildon 
Hill. 

But the Percys grumbled at the king, who would not 
pay them what they had spent in their wars with the 
Scotch. He would not permit Mortimer to be bought off 
from Glendower, who held him a captive. Mortimer was 
Hotspur's brother-in-law, and he was uncle to the young 
Earl of March, and Henry was glad to have him out of 
the way. Being thus offended, Mortimer and the Percys 
planned with their old foe, Douglas, to join Glendower 
in a fight to win the crown for Richard, if alive, or else 
for the Earl of March. 

Henry did not suspect the Percys, and he was on his 
way to join them in a fight with the Scots when he learned 
they were in arms for King Richard and were marching 
for Wales. He hurried West, and fought a fierce and 
bloody fight with them, where Hotspur fell, pierced by a 
shaft in the brain, and his band of troops fled. Worcester 
was taken, and paid for his revolt with his life. Nor- 
thumberland, who was not there, swore his son acted 
against his orders, and so escaped. He was killed in a 
third revolt some years after. The power of Glendower, 
who at times got aid from France, was at last broken by 
the Prince of Wales, but he never gave up or bowed to 
England's yoke. 

The king's health sank and he became subject to epi- 
leptic fits, and his spirits sank every day. When praying 
in Westminster Abbey he was seized with a fit and carried 
into the abbot's chamber, where he died. It had been 
foretold that he would die at Jerusalem, which certainly 
is not, and never was, Westminster. But as the abbot's 
room had long been called the Jerusalem Chamber, people 
said it was all the same thing, and were quite satisfied 
with the prediction. 

The king died in the forty-seventh year of his age and the 




Henry IV. 



(109) 



110 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

fourteenth of his reign. He was buried in Canterbury Ca- 
thedral. He had been twice married, and had by his first 
wife a family of four sons and two daughters. Consider- 
ing his duplicity before he came to the throne, his unjust 
seizure of it, and, above all, his making that monstrous 
law for the burning of what the priests called heretics, he 
was a reasonably good king, as kings went. 



CHAPTER XX. 

HENRY V. 

The Prince of Wales began his reign like a generous 
and honest man. He set the young Earl of March free ; 
he restored their estates and their honors to the Percy 
family, who had lost them by their rebellion against his 
father; he ordered Richard to be buried among the kings 
of England ; and he dismissed all his wild companions, 
with assurances that they should not want if they were 
steady, faithful and true. 

At this time the Lollards grew great in force and power, 
and their preachers spread through the land. Lord Cob- 
ham was at their head. He was an old friend of Henry's, 
who wished him to give up this faith. But good-will nor 
threats had any effect on Cobham. He was tried in the 
Bishop's court and declared a heretic, and was sent to the 
Tower. He escaped from there, and then grew to be a 
terror to the throne, which feared a Lollard rising with 
such a head — for Cobham was a tried soldier. He lay hid 
for a few years, but was at length caught and put to death 
as a traitor and a heretic. He was hung up in an iron 
chain and burned by a fire kindled below. 

There had been for some years a truce, and some wars 




Henry V. 



(Ill) 



112 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

with France, but never a peace. Charles VI. of France 
was now out of his mind, and his land was torn by bands 
who each wished to get at the head of the kingdom. 
Henry now resolved to cross over and claim " his inherit- 
ance.' ' When he first sent his troops to France the two 
sides came together as one and pushed the English back. 
Henry sailed for the Norman coast, and in his first fight 
took Harfleur. Sickness thinned his ranks, and he had 
but a mere handful of troops when he marched on Calais. 
Here, at Agincourt, he found sixty thousand French troops 
lined up to meet him. The king's pluck rose with his 
peril. One of his knights wished that the stout war men 
then in England were with them. Henry said, '* I would 
not have a man more. If God lets us win, it will be plain 
that we owe it to His grace. If not, the fewer we are the 
less loss to England." Sick and starved as were his men, 
they shared the king's view. When the chill, rainy night 
passed, his archers bared their arms and breasts to give 
fair play to " the crooked stick and the gray-goose wing;" 
but for which, as the rhyme rang, " England were but a 
fling," and with a great shout they sprang into the fight. 
The French were crowded in a space so small that they 
had scarce room to strike, and on ground so soft from the 
rains that the horses could hardly flounder through the 
mire. The fight was fierce and the loss great, and the 
English were forced back, but Henry and his men-of-arms 
around him flung themselves on the French lines. Henry 
was felled by a blow from a French mace, and the crown 
on his helmet was cleft by the sword of the Duke of Alen- 
con ; but he stuck to it, and in the end the French were 
routed and forced to flight. Eleven thousand French lay 
dead on the field, and more than one hundred princes and 
great lords were among the slain. 

The English troops were too used up to do more. They 
made their way to Calais and came back to England with 
their captives, where they made a great show in London. 



HENRY V. 113 

Iii 1417 Henry went once more to take Normandy. 
Fort after fort gave in. Rouen, at this time the largest 
and greatest town in France, held out for six months, but 
was at last starved out. Twelve thousand people from 
the towns who had fled to Rouen were forced out of the 
walls and left to die in the cold. They agreed to fire 
the city and fling themselves in a mass on the English 
lines, and Henry, who feared he would lose the prize, at 
last made terms. The man who headed the French there, 
and who for so long held him at bay, he killed in cold 
blood. Henry built a castle here, and here he held his 
court. A few more fights and all Normandy was his. The 
cost of the war troubled the people at home, so Henry 
made peace with the French crown. 

Just at this time the Duke of Burgundy was stabbed in 
the sight of the Dauphin, with whom he had been called 
for a talk. His friends, with Duke Philip at their head, 
flung themselves into Henry's hands in their wild thirst 
for revenge. The mad king, Charles, with his queen and 
daughters, were in Philip's hands, and in his vow to keep 
the Dauphin from the throne the duke stooped to buy 
English aid, and gave Katherine, the eldest of the French 
princesses, to Henry to wed, and conferred the regency on 
him, and swore to see that he was made king on the death 
of Charles. 

Henry died August 31, 1422. His funeral march from 
Rouen to Calais, and from Dover to London and West- 
minster, was more costly and showy than that of any king 
before him. He left one son, a child of nine months old, 
who bore his name. Katherine made a bad match with 
Owen Tudor, and in the course of time their heirs — the 
Tudor line of kings — came to sit on the English throne. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

HENRY VI. 

It had been the wish of the late king that while his in- 
fant son, King Henry VI., was under age, the Duke of 
Gloucester should be appointed regent. The English Par- 
liament, however, preferred to appoint a council of regency, 
with the Duke of Bedford at its head, to be represented, 
in his absence only, by the Duke of Gloucester. The Par- 
liament would seem to have been wise in this, for Glouces- 
ter soon showed himself to be ambitious and troublesome, 
and in the gratification of his own personal schemes gave 
offence to the Duke of Burgundy, which was with diffi- 
culty adjusted. 

As that duke declined the regency of France, it was be- 
stowed by the poor French king upon the Duke of Bed- 
ford. But the French king dying within two months, the 
dauphin instantly asserted his claim to the French throne, 
and was actually crowned under the title of Charles VII. 
The Duke of Bedford, to be a match for him, entered into 
a friendly league with the Dukes of Burgundy and Brit- 
tany, and gave them his two sisters in marriage. War with 
France was immediately renewed, and the perpetual peace 
came to an untimely end. 

In 1428 the English laid siege to Orleans, and its fall, 
which would lay the Dauphin's land free to them, seemed 
at hand, when France was saved as if by a miracle. From 
the town of Domremy came a girl of sixteen years — Jeanne 
d'Arc, or, as she is called in English, Joan of Arc — who 
claimed she had been sent by God to bring Charles to 
Rheims and crown him king. Rheims, where the French 
(114) 




Henry VI. 



(115) 



116 HIS TORY OF ENGLAND. 

kings had been crowned, was then in English hands, with 
more than ten thousand troops there. Joan led a force to 
Orleans, and with but a few men reached the city. Great 
crowds of troops followed her march to Rheims, where 
Charles was crowned, when Joan said, " O king ! God's 
will is done!" and she asked leave to go home. 

She was kept for some time at the French court, while 
the towns in the north of France opened their gates to the 
new-made king. In a new fight Charles was hurled back 
from the walls of Paris, and fell back behind the Loire. 
Joan fought with her old pluck, but she seemed to feel 
that her mission was at an end, and she was captured and 
sold to the English, who burned her at the stake for a 
heretic and a witch. She had wakened the heart of France 
and the English had lost ground. The Duke of Burgundy 
made peace with France in 1435. In the same year the 
regent, Bedford, died, and then the land that Henry inher- 
ited and won was lost past all chance. To England noth- 
ing was left but Calais and the bare name of King of France; 
and thus ended the hundred years' war. 

All this time there was strife among the great men as to 
who should rule. Humphrey, Henry's uncle, who was 
protector in Henry's youth, strove with Beaufort, Bishop 
of Winchester, and Cardinal Beaufort saw it was best to 
make peace, while Humphrey was for keeping up the war. 
Henry was of weak mind and had no more real rule as a 
man than he had as a child, and when he wed in 1445, his 
wife and her chief friend, the Marquis of Suffolk, had the 
rule. Margaret, Henry's wife, w r as the daughter of Rene, 
King of Sicily, who was related to the French king. Henry 
decided a long peace, and Suffolk thought he brought this 
near by the marriage, when it was agreed the English 
would give up the lands in Anjou and Maine. This the 
English did not like, but not much was said till Hum- 
phrey died in 1447. It was thought he was killed by 
Suffolk's order. 



118 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

Suffolk was brought to the bar for impeachment, and 
the king made him leave England for five years. His foes 
caught him at sea and his head was struck off. This mur- 
der brought on a rise of the poor people of Kent. Jack 
Cade, at the head of twenty thousand of them, called on 
the king to make some change in the laws. Stafford was 
sent to put them down, but at Sevenoaks he was whipped 
and slain. The king's troops then broke up, and Cade, 
whose forces had swelled to a large crowd, entered London. 
For three days he ruled the city and struck off the heads 
of some of the king's chief men. His mob broke into the 
houses and stole wealth and goods, and the people of 
London rose and drove them out. Cade was killed in a 
battle some time later in Sussex. 

There now arose a fight for rule between the Dukes of 
Somerset and York. Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, was 
liked at court, but the loss of Normandy, which he had 
ruled for England, was laid to his charge, and the poor 
people hated him. 

Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, as regent in France 
and lieutenant in Ireland, had shown rare skill, and when 
the king went mad he was made Protector. The next year 
the king got well and called back Somerset. Then broke 
out the fights called the " Wars of the Roses." The badge 
of the House of Lancaster was a red rose, and that of the 
House of York a white rose. At first things went ill for 
York, who fled to Ireland, but he came back and fought 
at Northampton. In this fight he took Henry, whose wife 
and son fled to Scotland. 

When the next Parliament met, the Duke of York came 
to the lords with his claim on the crown. The case was 
settled in this way : Henry was to reign for his life, and 
Richard of York should succeed him. This threw aside 
Edward, Henry's only son. 

This did not suit some of the nobles and they called for 
troops in the North. York met them with but a small 



EDWARD IV. 119 

force, and was killed in the fight. His son Edmund was 
stabbed in cold blood by Lord Clifford, who cried, u Thy 
father slew mine, and so will I thee and all thy kin." The 
Earl of Salisbury was caught and put to death, and York's 
head, with a paper crown on it, was set on the walls of the 
city from which he took his title. 

Richard's son, Edward, now Duke of York, came from 
the West. He routed a band of Red Roses, with Warwick 
at their head, and marched to London. The people ral- 
lied to his call, and cries of " Long live King Edward !" 
rang round the young leader as he rode through the 
streets. The lords voted that Henry of Lancaster had for- 
feited the throne. But the last act now lay not with the 
lords, but with the sword. Edward was crowned March 4, 
1461. Thus ended the reign, though not the life, of Henry, 
who founded Eton College and King's College at Cam- 
bridge. The death of Henry in the Tower, May 4, 1471, 
crushed the last hopes of the Lancastrians. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

EDWARD IV. 

King Edward IV. began to reign at the age of nineteen. 
He was false, gay, lewd and revengeful, with some ability, 
more personal beauty, and no principle. Before he was 
crowned he had to fight the Lancastrians at Towton, where 
his victory cost the lives of twenty-six thousand English- 
men. The young king took down the heads of his father 
and brother from the walls of York, and put up the heads 
of some of the most famous of the noblemen engaged in 
the battle on the other side. Then he went to London 
and was crowned with great splendor. 



120 



HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



Queen Margaret received help from Scotland, from the 
Duke of Brittany, and from the King of France, and took 
several important English castles. But Warwick soon 
retook them. She was obliged to take to the sea for safety, 
and in a storm lost all her treasures, and she and her son 




Queen Margaret and the Bobber. 



suffered great misfortunes. A story of the time tells that 
during her wanderings Margaret fell among thieves and 
was plundered of all she had. While they quarrelled 
over their booty she escaped, with her son Edward, into 
the depths of the forest. There she was met by another 
robber, to whom, in desperation, she presented the boy, 
saying, u Here, my friend, save the son of thy king." 
The outlaw's generosity was touched and he led them to 




Edward IV. 



(121) 



122 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

a place of safety. In the end, her soldiers being beaten 
and dispersed, she went abroad again, and kept quiet for 
the present. 

Henry, after the defeat of his party, was hidden in Lan- 
cashire till a faithless old monk told of his hiding-place. 
He was sent to London, where he was put on a horse, with 
his legs tied under it, and paraded three times around the 
pillory. He was then carried off to the Tower. 

Edward fell in love with and privately married Elizabeth 
Woodville, a young widow, very beautiful and very cap- 
tivating. He made her father Earl Rivers, her son Mar- 
quis of Dorset, and gave large estates and much power to 
the whole family of Woodvilles. This, and the marriage 
of his sister Margaret to the son of the Duke of Burgundy, 
offended Warwick and others who had placed him on the 
throne. To help him put down a rising of sixty thousand 
men in Yorkshire, Edward sent to Calais for his brother, 
the Duke of Clarence, and Warwick, whose eldest daughter 
Clarence had married against the king's wishes. They 
came and placed the king in the custody of Warwick's 
brother, the Archbishop of York, but set him at liberty 
because of a rising of the Lancastrians. The following 
year Warwick and Clarence raised troops against Edward, 
were proclaimed traitors, fled to France, and there, through 
Louis XL, joined Margaret to restore Henry, on condition 
that Prince Edward should marry Warwick's second 
daughter Anne, and, if they should die without children, 
Clarence should have the crown. Four weeks later War- 
wick arrived, drove Edward out of the kingdom, and took 
Henry out of the Tower and placed him on the throne. 

Edward returned, and by false pretences increased his 
followers, till he reached Barnett, where, with Clarence, 
who had all the time been playing false, he gave battle to 
Warwick, who fell in the fight. 

The loss of life was great, for the hatred was strong on 
both sides. The king-maker was defeated, and the king 



124 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

triumphed. Both the Earl of Warwick and his brother 
were slain, and their bodies lay in St. Paul's for some 
days, as a spectacle to the people. 

Margaret's spirit was not broken even by this great 
blow. Within five days she was in arms again, and raised 
her standard in Bath, whence she set off with her army 
to try and join Lord Pembroke, who had a force in Wales. 
But the king, coming up with her outside the town of 
Tewkesbury, ordered his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, 
to attack her men. She sustained an entire defeat, and 
was taken prisoner, together with her son, now eighteen 
years of age. The conduct of the king to this poor youth 
was worthy of his cruel character. He ordered him to be 
led into his tent. " And what," said he, " brought you to 
England?" " I came to England," replied the prisoner, 
" to recover my father's kingdom, which descended to him 
as his right ? and from him descends to me as mine." The 
king, drawing off his iron gauntlet, struck him with it 
in the face; and the Duke of Clarence and some other 
lords, who were there, drew their noble swords and killed 
him. 

His mother survived him, a prisoner, for five years. 
After her ransom, by the King of France, she survived for 
six years more. Within three weeks of this murder Henry 
died one of those convenient sudden deaths so common 
in the Tower ; in plainer words, he was murdered by the 
king's order. 

Edward called to him the great men of trade in London 
and asked from each a gift or " benevolence," as it was 
called, to meet his needs. This act was hated by those 
who liked the king best, but they dared not refuse. From 
these gifts grew the forced loans of Woolsey and Charles I. 

The House of York now seemed firm on the throne, but 
it was a divided house. The Duke of Clarence was at 
strife with his brother, the king, who brought him before 
the Peers on a charge of treason. He died in the Tower ; 




Edward V. 



(125) 



126 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

how, is not known, but it is thought he was drowned in a 
cask of wine. 

Edward died April 9, 1483. He died in the forty -second 
year of his life and the twenty-third of his reign. He 
left two sons, Edward, Prince of Wales, and Richard, Duke 
of York. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

EDWARD V. 

The late king's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, called 
Edward, after him, was only thirteen years of age at his 
father's death. He was at Ludlow Castle, with his uncle, 
the Earl of Rivers. The prince's brother, the Duke of 
York, only eleven years of age, was in London with his 
mother. The boldest, most crafty and most dreaded no- 
bleman in England at that time was their uncle Richard, 
Duke of Gloucester, and everybody wondered how the 
two poor boys would fare with such an uncle for a friend 
or a foe. 

Edward V. reigned less than three months, and was not 
crowned. On his road to London he was met by his uncle 
Richard, who had come up from the North, and by Stafford, 
of Buckingham. They cleared off his friends and brought 
the king to London. The poor boy wept when his friends 
left him. The king was lodged in the Tower, then a pal- 
ace, as well as a fort and prison, and Gloucester was made 
Protector. 

All the close friends of the boy-king were tried and be- 
headed. The young Duke of York was taken from his 
mother, and thus Gloucester had both the nephews in his 
hands. 



RICHARD III 127 

A claim was now made that the marriage of Edward IV. 
was not right and just, and so the lords and the knights, 
joined by the chief men of London, asked Gloucester to 
take the crown on his own head, which he did, and he sat 
in Westminster Hall as King Richard III, of England. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

RICHARD III. 

King Richard III. and his queen were crowned with a 
great deal of show and noise, which the people liked very 
much, and then the king set forth on a royal progress 
through his dominions. He was crowned a second time 
at York, and wherever he went was received with shouts 
of rejoicing from a good many people of strong lungs, 
who were paid to strain their throats in crying, " God 
save King Richard !' ' The plan was so successful that it 
has been imitated since by other usurpers, in other pro- 
gresses, through other dominions. 

While on this journey, King Richard stayed a week at 
Warwick, and from there he sent instructions home for 
one of the wickedest murders that ever was done — the 
murder of the two young princes, his nephews, who were 
shut up in the Tower of London. 

To the governor of the Tower Richard sent a letter, or- 
dering him to put the two young princes to death. The 
governor answered that he could not do so horrible a piece 
of work. The king called to him one James Tyrrel, his 
master of the horse, and gave him authority to take com- 
mand of the Tower. Tyrrel, knowing what was wanted, 
engaged two ruffians, and went to the Tower, showed his 



128 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

authority from the king, took command for twenty-four 
hours, and obtained possession of the keys. When night 
came he went creeping along the dark stone passages until 
he came to the door of the room where the two young 
princes lay fast asleep, clasped in each other's arms. And, 
while he watched, he sent in those evil demons, who 
smothered the two princes with the bed and pillows, and 
carried their bodies down and buried them at the staircase 
foot. And, when the day came, he gave up the command 
of the Tower, and restored the keys and hurried away. 
Years afterwards the bones of two boys, of the age of the 
young princes, were found in the White Tower beneath the 
stairs which led to the chapel. The then king, Charles II., 
brought them to Westminster, where they are buried as 
Edward V. and Richard, Duke of York. 

Buckingham drew around him a band of men high in 
the State, whose aim it was to bring Henry Tudor, Duke 
of Richmond, to the throne. Buckingham was deserted 
by his friends, caught, and his head struck off. The rest 
fled. 

The king's only child, Edward, died, and Richard made 
his sister's son his heir. The next year Queen Anne died, 
broke down by sorrow for the loss of her son ; or, as his 
foes claimed, by poison given her by Richard. It was 
.said that he knew no peace of mind ; his hand was ever on 
his dagger, and his rest broken by bad dreams. 

Richard had bound himself by oath to wed Elizabeth 
of York, and so make one of the rival Roses— the great 
bands of Yorkists and Lancastrians. Richmond, with a 
large force of Normans, landed in England and was met 
by Richard, who, in the fierce and bloody fight that was 
made, fell, pulled down by Lord Stanley, who picked up 
the crown, all bruised and trampled and stained with 
blood, and put it upon Richmond's head amid rejoicing 
cries of " Long live King Henry !" 

That night a horse was led up to the church of the Gray 




Richard III. 



(129) 



130 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Friars at Leicester, across whose back was tied, like some 
worthless sack, a naked body, brought there for burial. It 
was the body of the last of the Plantagenet line, King 
Richard III., usurper and murderer, slain at the battle of 
Bosworth Field in the thirty-second year of his age, after 
a reign of two years. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

HENRY VII. 

King Henry VII, did not turn out to be as fine a fel- 
low as the nobility and people hoped, in the first joy of 
their deliverance from Richard III. He was very cold 
and calculating, and would do anything for money. He 
possessed ability ; but his chief merit appears to have 
been that he was not cruel when there was nothing to be 
got by it. 

The new king had promised the nobles that he would 
marry the Princess Elizabeth. He did not care to wed 
her, but they were married, and he treated her very un- 
kindly. He did not like the House of York, and before 
a year had gone by they rose in arms, but were quelled 
and the leaders fell. 

Now rose a new claimant for the throne, styled Richard 
Plantagenet. He said he was the second son of Edward IV., 
and had been saved when his brother Edward V. was put 
to death. Henry said he was Perkin Warbeck. 

Troops were got to help his claim, but when he met 
Henry near Cornwall he left his forces and begged that 
his life be spared. Henry kept him in the Tower for two 
years and made him read a confession of his fraud. He, 
with the Ea.rl of Warwick, who for no crime but his birth 




Henry VII. 



(131) 



132 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

had lain in the cell for fourteen years, were put to death 
on charges of treason. 

The king's son, Arthur, at the age of fifteen, was wed to 
Katherine, daughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon, whose 
rule covered nearly all of the present Spain. Arthur died 
in five months, and the young wife was settled on King 
Henry's second son Henry, the Pope giving his consent to 
this union with a brother's wife. To make a peace between 
England and Scotland, the king's daughter, Margaret, was 
wed to James IV. of Scotland. This proved in the end 
to be the means of uniting the two kingdoms of Britain. 

With the Tudors there came a change in the laws of 
statecraft. The people would allow the king to be the 
sole ruler if he would keep order and hold a tight hand 
on the nobles, who grew so strong that in their own lands 
they could bend the laws to their will, and no one dared 
say them nay. 

Henry died of the gout in the fifty-third year of his age, 
after reigning twenty-four years. He was buried in the 
beautiful chapel of Westminster Abbey, which he had 
himself founded, and which still bears his name. 

It was in this reign that Christopher Columbus discov- 
ered what was then called the New World. Great wonder 
and hope of wealth being awakened in England thereby, 
the king and the merchants of London fitted out an Eng- 
lish expedition for further discoveries, and intrusted it to 
Sebastian Cabot, of Bristol, the son of a Venetian pilot 
there. He was very successful in his voyage, and gained 
high reputation, both for himself and England. 




Henry VII. Crowned on the Battlefield. 

(133) 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

HENRY VIII. 

We now come to King Henry VIII., whom it has been 
the fashion to call " Bluff King Hal," and " Burly King 
Harry," and other fine names, but whom I shall take the 
liberty to call plainly one of the most detestable villains 
that ever drew breath. You will be able to judge whether 
he deserves the character. 

He was just eighteen when he came to the throne. Peo- 
ple said he was handsome then, but I don't believe it. 
He was a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double- 
chinned, swinish-looking fellow, and it is not easy to be- 
lieve that so bad a character can ever have been veiled 
under a prepossessing appearance. 

He was anxious to make himself popular. He was ex- 
tremely fond of show and display, and so were the people ; 
therefore there was great rejoicing when he married the 
Princess Catharine, and when they were both crowned. 
And the king fought at tournaments, and always came 
off victorious — for the courtiers took care of that, and 
there was a general outcry that he was a wonderful man. 
Empson, Dudley and their supporters were accused of a 
variety of crimes they never committed, and they were 
pilloried, and set upon horses with their faces to the tails, 
and knocked about and beheaded, to the satisfaction of 
the people and the enrichment of the king. 

The pope, so indefatigable in getting the world into 

trouble, had mixed himself up in a war on the continent 

of Europe, occasioned by the reigning princes of little 

quarrelling states in Italy having at various times mar- 

(134) 



henry vin. 135 

ried into other royal families, and so led to their claiming 
a share in those petty governments. The king, Who dis- 
covered that he was very fond of the pope, sent a herald 
to the King of France to say that he must not make war 
upon that holy personage, because he was the father of all 
Christians. As the French king did not mind this rela- 
tionship and refused to admit a claim King Henry made 
to certain lands in France, war was declared between the 
two countries. Not to perplex this story with an account 
of the tricks and designs of all the sovereigns who were 
engaged in it, it is enough to say that England made a 
blundering alliance with Spain and got stupidly taken in 
by that country, which made its own terms with France 
and left England in the lurch. The king took it into his 
head to invade France in person, first executing that dan- 
gerous Earl of Suffolk, whom his father had left in the 
Tower, and appointing Queen Catharine to the charge of 
his kingdom in his absence. He sailed to Calais, where 
he was joined by Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, who 
pretended to be his soldier, and who took pay in his ser- 
vice — with a good deal of nonsense of that sort, flattering 
enough to the vanity of a vain blusterer. Fortune, how- 
ever, favored him better than he deserved, for after much 
waste of time in tent-pitching, flag-flying, gold-curtain- 
ing, and other such masquerading, he gave the French 
battle at Guinegate, where they took such a panic and 
fled with such swiftness that it was ever afterwards called 
by the English the Battle of Spurs. Instead of following 
up his advantage, the king, finding that he had had enough 
of real fighting, came home again. 

The Scottish king, though nearly related to Henry by 
marriage, had taken part against him in this war. The 
Earl of Surrey, as the English general, advanced to meet 
him. The two armies came up with one another, and 
were encamped upon the Hill of Flodden. Along the 
plain below it the English, when the hour of battle came, 



136 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

advanced. The Scottish army, which had been drawn up 
in five great bodies, then came steadily down in perfect 
silence. So they, in their turn, advanced to meet the Eng- 
lish army, which came on in one long line, and they at- 
tacked it with a body of spearmen. At first they had the 
best of it ; but the English recovered themselves and fought 
with such valor that Scottish power was routed. Ten 
thousand Scottish men lay dead that day on Flodden 
Field, and among them numbers of the nobility and gen- 
try. For a long time afterwards the Scottish peasantry 
believed that their king had not been killed in this battle, 
because no Englishman had found an iron belt he wore 
about his body as a penance for having been an undutiful 
son. But whatever became of his belt, the English had 
his sword and dagger, and the ring from his finger, and 
his body, too, covered with wounds. There is no doubt 
of it, for it was seen and recognized by English gentle- 
men who had known the Scottish king well. 

When Henry was making ready to renew the war in 
France, the French king was contemplating peace. His 
queen dying at this time, he proposed to marry Henry's 
sister, the Princess Mary, who, besides being only sixteen, 
was betrothed to the Duke of Suffolk. The marriage was 
concluded, and the poor girl was escorted to France, where 
she was left as the French king's bride, with only one of 
all her English attendants. That one was a pretty young 
girl named Anne Boleyn, niece of the Earl of Surrey, who 
had been made Duke of Norfolk after the victory of 
Flodden Field. 

The French king, who was proud of his young wife, was 
preparing for many years of happiness, and she was look- 
ing forward to many years of misery, when he died within 
three months, and left her a young widow. The new 
French monarch, Francis I., seeing how important it was 
to his interests that she should take for her second hus- 
band no one but an Englishman, advised her first lover, 



HENRY VIIL 137 

the Duke of Suffolk (when Henry sent him over to France 
to fetch her home), to marry her. The princess being fond 
of that duke, they were wedded, and Henry afterwards 
forgave them. In making interest with the king, the Duke 
of Suffolk had addressed his most powerful favorite and 
adviser, Thomas Wolsey — a name very famous in history 
for its rise and downfall. 

Wolsey was the son of a respectable butcher at Ipswich, 
and received so excellent an education that he became a 
tutor to the family of the Marquis of Dorset, who after- 
wards got him appointed one of the late king's chaplains. 
On the accession of Henry he was promoted and taken 
into favor. He was now Archbishop of York ; the pope 
had made him a cardinal besides ; and whoever wanted 
influence in England, or favor with the king, was obliged 
to make a friend of the great Cardinal Wolsey. 

He was a gay man, who could dance and jest and sing 
and drink ; and those were the roads to so much, or rather 
so little, of a heart as King Henry had. He was wonder- 
fully fond of pomp and glitter, and so was the king. He 
knew a good deal of the church learning of that time, 
much of which consisted in finding artful excuses and 
pretences for almost any wrong thing, and in arguing that 
black was white, or any other color. This kind of learn- 
ing pleased the king, too. The cardinal was high in esti- 
mation with the king, and being a man of great ability, 
knew as well how to manage him as a clever keeper may 
know how to manage a wolf or a tiger, or any other cruel 
and uncertain beast that may turn upon him and tear 
him any day. Never had there been seen in England 
such state as my lord cardinal kept. His wealth was 
enormous — equal, it was reckoned, to the riches of the 
crown. His palaces were as splendid as the king's, and 
his retinue was eight hundred strong. He held his court 
dressed out from top to toe in flaming scarlet, and his 
very shoes were golden, set with precious stones. His fol- 



138 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

lowers rode on blooded horses, while he, with a wonderful 
affectation of humility in the midst of his great splendor, 
ambled on a mule with a red velvet saddle and bridle and 
golden stirrups. 

Through the influence of this stately priest a grand 
meeting was arranged to take place between the French 
and English kings in France, but on ground belonging to 
England. A prodigious show of friendship and rejoicing 
was to be made on the occasion, and heralds were sent to 
proclaim with brazen trumpets through all the principal 
cities of Europe that the Kings of France and England, 
as brothers in arms, each attended by eighteen followers, 
would hold a tournament against all knights who might 
choose to come. 

Charles, the new Emperor of Germany, wanted to pre- 
vent too cordial an alliance between these sovereigns, and 
came over to England before the king could repair to the 
place of meeting, and secured Wolsey's interest b$ prom- 
ising that his influence should make him pope when 
the next vacancy occurred. On the day when the emperor 
left England the king and all the court went over to Calais, 
and thence to the place of meeting, commonly called the 
Field of the Cloth of Gold. Here all manner of expense 
and prodigality was lavished on the decorations of the 
show, many of the knights and gentlemen being so su- 
perbly dressed that it was said they carried their whole 
estates upon their shoulders. 

There were sham castles, temporary chapels, fountains 
of running wine, great cellars full of wine free as water to 
all comers, silk tents, gold lace and foil, gilt lions, and 
such things without end; and in the midst of all the rich 
cardinal outshone and out-glittered all the noblemen and 
gentlemen assembled. After a treaty made between the 
two kings the lists were opened for the tournament, the 
Queens of France and England looking on with great array 
of lords and ladies. Then for ten days the two sovereigns 




Henry VTTT. 



(139) 



140 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

fought five combats every day and always beat their 
polite adversaries, though they do write that the King of 
England, being thrown in a wrestle one day by the King 
of France, lost his kingly temper with his brother in arms 
and wanted to make a quarrel of it. Then there is a great 
story belonging to this Field of the Cloth of Gold, showing 
how the English were distrustful of the French, and the 
French of the English, until Francis rode alone one morn- 
ing to Henry's tent, and, going in before he was out of 
bed, told him in joke that he was his prisoner, and how 
Henry jumped out of bed and embraced Francis, and how 
Francis helped Henry to dress and warmed his linen for 
him, and how Henry gave Francis a splendid jewelled 
collar, and how Francis gave Henry, in return, a costly 
bracelet. All this was so written about that the world has 
had good cause to be sick of it forever. 

Of course, nothing came of all these fine doings but a 
speedy renewal of the war between England and France, 
in which the two royal companions and brothers in arms 
longed very earnestly to damage one another. Before it 
broke out again the Duke of Buckingham was shame- 
fully executed on Tower Hill, on the evidence of a dis- 
charged servant — really for nothing. It was believed that 
the unfortunate duke had given offence to the cardinal by 
expressing his mind freely about the expense and ab- 
surdity of the whole business of the Field of the Cloth of 
Gold. At any rate, he was beheaded, as I have said, for 
nothing. And the people who saw it done were very 
angry, and cried out that it was the work of " the butcher's 
son!'' 

The new war was a short one, though the Enrl of Surrey 
invaded France again, and did some injury to that coun- 
try. It ended in another treaty of peace between the two 
kingdoms, and in the discovery that the Emperor of Ger- 
many was not such a good friend to England as he pre- 
tended to be. Neither did he keep his promise to Wolsey 



HENRY VIII. 



141 



to make him pope, though the king urged him. Two 
popes died in quick succession, but the foreign priests 
were too much for the cardinal, and kept him out of the 




Martin Luther. 



post. So the cardinal and king together found out that 
the Emperor of Germany was not a man to keep faith 
with, broke off a projected marriage between the king's 
daughter, Mary, Princess of Wales, and that sovereign, 
and began to consider whether it might not be well to 



142 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

marry the young lady either to Francis himself, or to his 
eldest son. 

There now arose in Germany the great leader of the 
mighty change in England which is called The Reforma- 
tion, and which set the people free from their slavery to 
the priests. This was a learned doctor, named Martin 
Luther, who knew all about them, for he had been a priest, 
and even a monk, himself. The preaching and writing 
of Wickliffe had set a number of men thinking on this 
subject, and Luther finding one day, to his great surprise, 
that there really was a book called the New Testament 
which the priests did not allow to be read, and which con- 
tained truths that they suppressed, began to be very vigor- 
ous against the whole body, from the pope downward. It 
happened, while he was yet only beginning his vast work 
of awakening the nation, that a fellow named Tetzel, a friar 
of very bad character, came into his neighborhood selling 
what were called indulgences by wholesale, to raise money 
for beautifying the great Cathedral of St. Peter's at Rome. 
Whoever bought an indulgence of the pope was supposed 
to buy himself off from the punishment of heaven for his 
offences. Luther told the people that these indulgences 
were worthless bits of paper, and that Tetzel and his mas- 
ters were a crew of impostors in selling them. 

The king and the cardinal were mightily indignant at 
this presumption, and the king (with the help of Sir 
Thomas More, a wise man, whom he afterwards repaid by 
striking off his head) even wrote a book about it, with 
which the pope was so well pleased that he gave the king 
the title of Defender of the Faith. The king and the car- 
dinal also issued flaming warnings to the people not to 
read Luther's books, on pain of excommunication. But 
they read them for all that, and the rumor of what was in 
them spread far and wide. 

When this great change was thus going on, the king be- 
gan to show himself in his true colors. Anne Boleyn, the 



SMNRY VIII. 148 

pretty little girl who had gone abroad to France with his 
sister, was by this time grown up to be very beautiful, and 
was one of the ladies in attendance on Queen Catharine. 
Now Queen Catharine was no longer young or handsome, 
and it is likely that she was not particularly good-tem- 
pered, having been always rather melancholy, and having 
been made more so by the deaths of four of her children 
when they were very young. So the king fell in love with 
the fair Anne Boleyn, and said to himself, " How can I 
be best rid of my own troublesome wife, whom I am tired 
of, and marry Anne?" 

Catharine had been previously married to Henry's 
brother. What does the king do but call his favorite priests 
about him and says, " O, his mind is in such a dread- 
ful state, and he is so frightfully uneasy, because he is 
afraid it was not lawful for him to marry the queen !" Not 
one of those priests had the courage to hint that it was 
rather curious he had never thought of that before, and 
that his mind seemed to have been in a tolerably jolly 
condition during a great many years, in which he certainly 
had not fretted himself thin, but they all said, Ah ! that 
was very true, and it was a serious business, and perhaps 
the best way to make it right would be for his Majesty to 
be divorced! The king replied, Yes; he thought that 
would be the best way, certainly ; so they all went to 
work. 

After a vast deal of negotiation and evasion, the pope 
issued a commission to Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal 
Campeggio (whom he sent over from Italy for the pur- 
pose) to try the whole case in England. It is supposed 
that Wolsey was the queen's enemy, because she had re- 
proved him for his proud manner of life. He did not 
know that the king wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and 
when he did know it he went down on his knees in the 
endeavor to dissuade him. 

The cardinals opened their court in the Convent of the 



144 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Black Friars, near to where the bridge of that name in 
London now stands, and the king and queen, that they 
might be near it, took up their lodgings at the adjoining 
palace of Bridewell, of which nothing now remains but a 
bad prison. On the opening of the court, when the king 
and queen were called on to appear, that poor, ill-used 
lady, with a dignity and firmness, and yet with a womanly 
affection worthy to be always admired, went and kneeled 
at the king's feet, and said that she had come a stranger 
to his dominions, that she had been a good and true wife 
to him for twenty years, and that she could acknowledge 
no power in those cardinals to try whether she should be 
considered his wife after all that time, or should be put 
away. With that she got up and left the court, and never 
afterwards came back to it. 

The king pretended to be very much overcome and said, 
" O my lords and gentlemen, what a good woman she was 
to be sure," and how delighted he would be to live with 
her unto death, but for that terrible uneasiness in his 
mind, which was quite wearing him away! So the case 
went on, and there was nothing but talk for two months. 
Then Cardinal Campeggio. on behalf of the pope, ad- 
journed it for two months, and before that time was 
elapsed the pope himself adjourned it indefinitely by re- 
quiring the king and queen to come to Rome and have it 
tried there. But, by good luck for the king, word was 
brought to him that Thomas Cranmer, a learned doctor 
of Cambridge, had proposed to urge the pope on by re- 
ferring the case to all the learned doctors and bishops 
here and there and everywhere, and getting their opinions 
that the king's marriage was unlawful. The king, who 
was now in a hurry to marry Anne Boleyn, thought this 
such a good idea that he sent for Cranmer, and said to 
Lord Rochfort, Anne Boleyn's father, " Take this learned 
doctor down to your country-house, and there let him 
have a good room for a study, and no end of books out of 



BENRY VIIL 145 

which to prove that I may marry your daughter." Roch- 
fort made the learned doctor comfortable, and the learned 
doctor went to work to prove his case. All this time the 
king and Anne Boleyn were writing letters daily to one 
another, full of impatience to have the case settled, and 
Anne Boleyn was showing herself (as I think) very worthy 
of the fate which afterwards befell her. 

It was bad for Cardinal Wolsey that he had left Cran- 
mer to render this help. It was worse for him that he had 
tried to dissuade the king from marrying Anne Boleyn. 
Such a servant as he, to such a master as Henry, would 
probably have fallen in any case, but between the hatred 
of the party of the queen that was and the hatred of the 
party of the queen that was to be he fell suddenly and 
heavily. Going down one day to the court of chancery, 
where he now presided, he was waited upon by the Dukes 
of Norfolk and Suffolk, who told him that they brought 
an order to him to resign that office. The cardinal refus- 
ing, they rode off to the king, and next day came back 
with a letter from him, on reading which the cardinal sub- 
mitted. An inventory was made out of all the riches in 
his palace at York Place (now Whitehall), and he went 
sorrowfully up the river in his barge to Putney. An ab- 
ject man he was, in spite of his pride; for being over- 
taken, riding out of that place towards Esher, by one of 
the king's chamberlains who brought him a kind message 
and a ring, he alighted from his mule, took off his cap, 
and kneeled down in the dirt, 

The once proud cardinal was soon further disgraced, 
and wrote the most abject letters to his vile sovereign, who 
humbled him one day and encouraged him the next, ac- 
cording to his humor, until he was at last ordered to go 
and reside in his diocese of York. He said he was too 
poor, but I don't know how he made that out, for he took 
a hundred and sixty servants with him, and seventy-two 
cart-loads of furniture, food and wine. He remained there 

10 



146 BISTORT OF ENGLAND. 

nearly a year, and showed himself so improved by his mis- 
fortunes, and was so conciliating, that he won all hearts. 
At last he was arrested for high treason, and, coming 
slowly on his journey towards London, got as far as Lei- 
cester. Arriving at Leicester Abbey after dark, and very 
ill, he said — when the monks came out at the gate with 
lighted torches to receive him — that he had come to lay 
his bones among them. He had, indeed, for he was taken 
to a bed, from which he never rose again. His last words 
were, " Had I but served God as diligently as I have served 
the king, he would not have given me over in my gray 
hairs. Howbeit, this is my just reward for my pains and 
diligence, not regarding my service to God, but only my 
duty to my prince." The news of his death was quickly 
carried to the king, who was amusing himself with archery 
in the garden of the magnificent palace at Hampton Court 
which that very Wolsey had presented to him. The greatest 
emotion his royal mind displayed was a particular desire 
to lay hold of fifteen hundred pounds which the cardinal 
was reported to have hidden somewhere. 

The opinions concerning the divorce being at last col- 
lected, and being generally in the king's favor, were for- 
warded to the pope, with an entreaty that he would now 
grant it. The unfortunate Pope, who was a timid man, 
was half distracted between his fear of his authority being 
set aside in England if he did not do as he was asked, and 
his dread of offending the Emperor of Germany, who was 
Queen Catharine's nephew. In this state of mind he still 
evaded, and did nothing. Then Thomas Cromwell, who 
had been one of Wolsey 's faithful attendants, advised the 
king to take the matter into his own hands, and make 
himself the head of the whole church. This the king, by 
various artful means, began to do, but he recompensed 
the clergy by allowing them to burn as many people as 
they pleased for holding Luther's opinions. Sir Thomas 
More, the wise man who had helped the king with his 



HENRY VIII. 147 

book, had been made chancellor in Wolsey's place. But 




Burning at the Stake. 



as he was truly attached to the Church as it was, even in 
its abuses, he, in this state of things, resigned. 



148 RISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

Being resolved to get rid of Catharine, and to marry 
Anne Boleyn without more ado, the king made Cranmer 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and directed Catharine to leave 
the court. She obeyed, but replied that wherever she 
went she was Queen of England still, and would remain 
so to the last. The king then married Anne Boleyn pri- 
vately, and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, within half 
a year, declared his marriage with Queen Catharine void, 
and crowned Anne Boleyn queen. 

She might have known that no good could ever come 
from such wrong, and that the corpulent brute who had been 
so faithless and so cruel to his first wife could be more faith- 
less and more cruel to his second. She might have known 
that even when he was in love with her he had been a 
mean and selfish coward, running away, like a frightened 
cur, from her society and her house when a dangerous 
sickness broke out in it. But Anne Boleyn arrived at all 
this knowledge too late, and bought it at a dear price. Her 
bad marriage with a worse man came to its natural end. 

The pope was in an angry state of mind when he heard 
of the king's marriage, and fumed exceedingly. Many of 
the English monks and friars, seeing that their order was 
in danger, did the same ; some even declaimed against the 
king in church, before his face, and were not to be stopped 
until he himself roared out, "Silence!" The king, not 
much the worse for this, took it quietly, and was very glad 
when his queen gave birth to a daughter, who was christ- 
ened Elizabeth and declared Princess of Wales, as her 
sister Mary had already been. 

One of the most atrocious features of this reign was that 
Henry VIII. was always trimming between the reformed 
religion and the unreformed one, so that the more he quar- 
relled with the pope the more of his own subjects he 
roasted alive for not holding the Pope's opinion. Thus, an 
unfortunate student and a poor, simple tailor were burnt in 
Smithfield, to show what a capital Christian the king was. 



HENRY VIII. 149 

But these were speedily followed by two much greater 
victims, Sir Thomas More and John Fisher, the Bishop of 
Rochester. The latter, who was a good and amiable old 
man, had committed no greater offence than believing in 
Elizabeth Barton, called the Maid of Kent, another of those 
ridiculous women who pretended to be inspired and to 
make all sorts of heavenly revelations. For this offence, 
as it was pretended, but really for denying the king to be 
the supreme head of the Church, he got into trouble and 
was put in prison ; but even then he might have been suf- 
fered to die naturally but that the pope, to spite the king, 
made him a cardinal. Upon that the king made a fero- 
cious joke to the effect that the pope might send Fisher a 
red hat (which is the way they make a cardinal) but he 
should have no head on which to wear it, and he was tried 
with all unfairness and injustice and sentenced to death. 
He died like a noble and virtuous old man. The king 
supposed that Sir Thomas More would be frightened by 
this example; but as he was not easily terrified, and, thor- 
oughly believing in the pope, had made up his mind that 
the king was not the rightful head of the Church, he posi- 
tively refused to say that he was. For this crime he, too, 
was tried and sentenced, after having been in prison a 
year. When he was doomed to death, and came away 
from his trial with the edge of the executioner's axe turned 
towards him, he bore it serenely. When he was going up 
the steps of the scaffold to his death he said jokingly, to 
the lieutenant of the tower, " I pray you, Master Lieu- 
tenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, I can 
shift for myself." Also, he said to the executioner, after 
he had laid his head upon the block, " Let me put my 
beard out of the way, for that, at least, has never com- 
mitted any treason." Then his head was struck off at a 
blow. These two executions were worthy of King Henry 
VIII. Sir Thomas More was one of the most virtuous 
men in his dominions, and the bishop was one of his old- 



150 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

est and truest friends. But to be a friend of that fellow 
was almost as dangerous as to be his wife. 

When the news of these two murders got to Rome the 
pope raged against the murderer more than ever pope 
raged since the world began, and prepared a bull, ordering 
his subjects to take arms against him and dethrone him 
The king took all possible precautions to keep that docu- 
ment out of his dominions, and set to work, in return, to 
suppress a great number of the English monasteries and 
abbeys. 

This destruction was begun by a body of commission- 
ers, of whom Cromwell (whom the king had taken into 
great favor) was the head, and was carried on through 
some few years to its entire completion. There is no doubt 
that many of these religious establishments were religious 
in nothing but in name, and were crammed with lazy, in- 
dolent, and sensual monks. But there is no doubt, either, 
that the king's officers and men punished the good monks 
with the bad, did great injustice, demolished many beau- 
tiful things and many valuable libraries, destroyed num- 
bers of paintings, stained-glass windows, fine pavements 
and carvings, and that the whole court were ravenously 
greedy and rapacious for the division of this great spoil 
among them. The king seems to have grown almost mad 
in the ardor of this pursuit, for he declared Thomas a 
Becket a traitor, though he had been dead so many years, 
and had his body dug up out of his grave. He must have 
been as miraculous as the monks pretended, if they had 
told the truth, for he was found with one head on his 
shoulders, and they had shown another as his undoubted 
and genuine head ever since his death, it had brought 
them vast sums of money, too. The gold and jewels on 
his shrine filled two great chests, and eight men tottered 
as they carried them away. How rich the monasteries 
were you may infer from the fact that when they were 
all suppressed one hundred and thirty thousand pounds 



HENRY VIII. 151 

a year — in those days an immense sum — came to the 
crown. 

These things were not clone without causing great dis- 
content among the people. The monks had been good 
landlords and hospitable entertainers of all travellers, and 
had been accustomed to give away a great deal of corn 
and fruit, and meat, and other things. In those days it 
was difficult to change goods into money in consequence 
of the roads being very few and very bad, and the carts 
and wagons of the worst description, and they must either 
have given away some of the good things they possessed 
in enormous quantities, or have suffered them to spoil and 
moulder. So many of the people missed what it was more 
agreeable to get idly than to work for, and the monks who 
were driven out of their homes and wandered about en- 
couraged their discontent, and there were, consequently, 
great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. These were 
put down by terrific executions, from which the monks 
themselves did not escape, and the king went on grunting 
and growling in his own fat way, like a royal pig. 

I have told this story of the religious houses at one 
time, to make it plainer, and to get back to the king's do- 
mestic affairs. 

The unfortunate Queen Catharine was by this time 
dead, and the king was by this time as tired of his second 
queen as he had been of his first. As he had fallen in 
love with Anne when she was in the service of Catharine, 
so he now fell in love with another lady in the service of 
Anne. See how wicked deeds are punished, and how bit 
terly and self-reproachfully the queen must now have 
thought of her own rise to the throne ! The new fancy 
was a Lady Jane Seymour, and the king no sooner set his 
mind on her than he resolved to have Anne Boleyn's head. 
So he brought a number of charges against Anne, accus- 
ing her of dreadful crimes which she had never committed, 
and implicating in them her own brother and certain gen- 



152 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

tlemen in her service. As the lords and councillors were 
as afraid of the king and as subservient to him as the 
meanest peasant in England was, they brought in Anne 
Boleyn guilty, and the other unfortunate persons accused 
with her, guilty, too. These gentlemen died like men. 
There was then only the queen to dispose of. She had 
been surrounded in the Tower with women spies, had been 
monstrously persecuted and foully slandered, and had re- 
ceived no justice. But her spirit rose with her afflictions, 
and after having in vain tried to soften the king by writing 
an affecting letter to him, which still exists, "from her 
doleful prison in the Tower," she resigned herself to death. 
She said to those about her, very cheerfully, that she had 
heard say the executioner was a good one, and that she 
had a little neck (she laughed and clasped it with her 
hands as she said that), and would soon be out of her 
pain. And she was soon out of pain, poor creature ! on 
the green inside the Tower, and her body was flung into 
an old box and put away into the ground under the 
chapel. 

There is a story that the king sat in his palace listening 
very anxiously for the sound of the cannon which was to 
announce this new murder, and that when he heard it 
come booming on the air he rose up in great spirits and 
ordered out his dogs to go a-hunting. He was bad enough 
to do it ; but whether he did it or not, it is certain that 
he married Jane Seymour the very next day. 

I have not much pleasure in recording that she lived 
just long enough to give birth to a son, who was christened 
Edward, and then to die of fever, for I cannot but 
think that any woman who married such a ruffian, and 
knew what innocent blood was on his hands, deserved the 
axe, that would assuredly have fallen on the neck of Jane 
Seymour if she had lived much longer. 

Cranmerhad done what he could to save some of the 
Church property for purposes of religion and education, 



HENRY VIII. 153 

but the great families had been so hungry to get hold of it 
that very little could be rescued for such objects. Even 
Miles Coverdale, who did the people the inestimable ser- 
vice of translating the Bible int© English (which the unre- 
formed religion never permitted to be done), was left in 
poverty, while the great families clutched the Church lands 
and money. The people had been told that when the 
crown came into possession of these funds it would not 
be necessary to tax them; but they were taxed afresh, 
directly afterwards. It was fortunate for them, indeed, 
that so many nobles were so greedy for this wealth, since, 
if it had remained with the crown, there might have been 
no end to tyranny for hundreds of years. One of the most 
active writers on the Church's side, against the king, was 
a member of his own family, a sort of distant cousin, Reg- 
inald Pole by name, who attacked him in the most violent 
manner (though he received a pension from him all the 
time), and fought for the Church with his pen day and 
night. As he was beyond the king's reach, being in Italy, 
the king politely invited him over to discuss the subject ; 
but he wisely staying where he was, the king's rage fell 
upon his brother, Lord Montague, the Marquis of Exeter, 
and some other gentlemen, who were tried for high treason 
in corresponding with him and aiding him, which they 
probably did, and were all executed. The pope made 
Reginald Pole a cardinal, but so much against his will that 
it is thought he even aspired in his mind to the vacant 
throne of England, and had hopes of marrying the Princess 
Mary. His being made a high priest, however, put an end 
to all that. His mother, the venerable Countess of Salis- 
bury, who was, unfortunately for herself,within the tyrant's 
reach, was the last of his relatives on whom his wrath fell. 
When she w T as told to lay her gray head upon the block 
she answered the executioner, " No ! my head never com- 
mitted treason, and if you want it you shall seize it !" So 
she ran around and around the scaffold, with the execu- 



154 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

tioner striking at her and her gray hair bedabbled with 
blood ; and even when they held her down upon the block 
she moved her head about to the last, resolved to be no 
party to her own barbarous murder. All this the people 
bore, as they had borne everything else. 

Indeed, they bore much more, for the slow fires of 
Smithfield were continually burning, and people were con- 
stantly being roasted to death — still to show what a good 
Christian the king was. He defied the pope and his bull, 
which was now issued and had come into England; but 
he burned innumerable people, whose only offense was 
that they differed from the pope's religious opinions. 
There was a wretched man named Lambert, among others, 
who was tried for this before the king, and with whom six 
bishops argued, one after another. When he was quite 
exhausted (as well he might be, after six bishops), lie threw 
himself on the king's mercy, but the king blustered out 
that he had no mercy for heretics. So he, too, fed the fire. 

All this the people bore, and more than all this yet. 
The national spirit seems to have been banished from the 
kingdom at this time. The very people who were execu- 
ted for treason, the very wives and friends of the " bluff" 
king, spoke of him on the scaffold as a good prince and a 
gentle prince, just as serfs in similar circumstances have 
been known to do under the sultans and bashaws of the 
East, or under the fierce old tyrants of Russia, who poured 
boiling and freezing water on them alternately, until they 
died. The Parliament was as bad as the rest, and gave 
the king whatever he wanted ; among other vile accommo- 
dations they gave him new powers of murdering, at his 
will and pleasure, any one whom he might choose to call 
a traitor. But the worst measure they passed was an act 
of six articles, commonly called at the time "the whip 
with six strings," which punished offences against the 
pope's opinions without mercy, and enforced the very 
worst parts of the monkish religion. Cranmer would have 



156 HIS TORY OF ENGLAND. 

modified it if he could, but being overborne by the Rom- 
ish party, had not the power. As one of the articles de- 
clared that priests should not marry, and as he was himself 
married, he sent his wife and children into Germany and 
began to tremble at his danger; none the less because he 
was, and had long been, the king's friend. This whip of 
six strings was made under the king's own eye. It should 
never be forgotten of him how cruelly he supported the 
worst of the popish doctrines, when there was nothing to 
be got by opposing them. 

This amiable monarch now thought of taking another 
wife. He proposed to the French king to have some of 
the ladies of the French court exhibited before him, that 
he might have his royal choice ; but the French king an- 
swered that he would not have his ladies trotted out to be 
shown like horses at a fair. He proposed to the Dowager 
Duchess of Milan, who replied that she might have thought 
of such a match if she had had two heads, but that, only 
owning one, she must beg to keep it safe. At last, Crom- 
well representing that there was a Protestant princess in 
Germany (those who held the reformed religion were 
called Protestants, because their leaders had protested 
against the abuses of the unreformed church), named Anne 
of Cleves, who was beautiful, and would answer the pur- 
pose admirably, the king said, Was she a large woman ? 
because he must have a fat wife. "O yes!" said Crom- 
well, "she was very large, just the thing." On hearing 
this, the king sent over Hans Holbein to take her portrait. 
Hans made her out to be so good-looking that the king 
was satisfied and the marriage was arranged. When 
Anne came over, and the king went to Rochester to meet 
her, and first saw her without her seeing him, he swore 
she was " a great Flanders mare," and said he would never 
marry her. Being obliged to do it, now matters had gone 
so far, he would not give her the presents he had prepared, 
and would never notice her. He never forgave Crom- 



HENRY VIII. 157 

well his part in the affair. His downfall elates from that 
time. 

It was quickened by his enemies, in the interests of the 
unreformed religion, putting in the king's way a niece of 
the Duke of Norfolk, Catherine Howard, a young lady of 
fascinating manners, though small in stature and not par- 
ticularly beautiful. Falling in love with her on the spot, 
the king soon divorced Anne of Cleves, after making her 
the subject of much brutal talk, on pretence that she had 
been previously betrothed to some one else — which would 
never do for one of his dignity — and married Catherine. 
On his wedding-day, of all days in the year, he sent his 
faithful Cromwell to the scaffold, and had his head struck 
off. He further celebrated the occasion by burning at one 
time, and causing to be drawn to the fire on the same hur- 
dles, some Protestant prisoners for denying the pope's 
doctrines, and some Roman Catholic prisoners for denying 
his own supremacy. Still the people bore it, and not a 
gentleman in England raised his hand. 

But, by a just retribution, it soon came out that Cathe- 
rine Howard, before her marriage, had been really guilty of 
such crimes as the king had falsely attributed to his sec- 
ond wife, Anne Boleyn ; so again the dreadful axe made 
the king a widower, and this queen passed away as so 
many in that reign had passed away before her. As an 
appropriate pursuit under the circumstances, Henry then 
applied himself to superintending the composition of a 
religious book called "A Necessary Doctrine for any 
Christian Man." He must have been a little confused in 
his mind, I think, at about this period, for he was so false 
to himself as to be true to some one — that some one being 
Cranmer, whom the Duke of Norfolk and others of his 
enemies tried to ruin, but to whom the king was steadfast, 
and to whom he one night gave his ring, charging him, 
when he should find himself next day accused of treason, 
to show it to the council board. This Cranmer did, to the 



158 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

confusion of his enemies. I suppose the king thought he 
might want him a little longer. 

He married yet once more. Yes, strange to say. he 
found in England another woman who would become 
his wife; and she was Catherine Parr, widow of Lord 
Latimer. She leaned toward the reformed religion; and 
it is some comfort to know that she tormented the king 
considerably by arguing a variety of doctrinal points with 
him on all possible occasions. She had very nearly done 
this to her own destruction. After one of these conversa- 
tions, the king, in a very black mood, actually instructed 
Gardiner, one of the bishops who favored the popish 
opinions, to draw a bill of accusation against her, which 
would have inevitably brought her to the scaffold where 
her predecessors had died, but that one of her friends 
picked up the paper of instructions, which had been 
dropped in the palace, and gave her timely notice. She 
fell ill with terror, but managed the king so well when he 
came to entrap her into further statements, by saying 
that she had only spoken on such points to divert his 
mind and to get some information from his extraor- 
dinary wisdom, that he gave her a kiss and called her 
his sweetheart ; and when the chancellor came next clay, 
actually to take her to the Tower, the king sent him about 
his business, and honored him with the epithets of a 
beast, a knave, and a fool. So near was Catherine Pan- 
to the block, and so narrow was her escape ! 

There was a war with Scotland in this reign, and a 
short, clumsy war with France for favoring Scotland ; 
but the events at home were so dreadful, and leave such 
an enduring stain on the country, that I need say no 
more of what happened abroad. 

A few more horrors, and this reign is over. There was 
a lady, Anne Askew, in Lincolnshire, who inclined to the 
Protestant opinions, and whose husband, being a fierce 
Catholic, turned her out of the house. She came to Lon- 



HENRY VIII. 159 

don, and was considered as offending against the six 
articles, and was taken to the Tower and put upon the 
rack, probably because it was hoped she might, in her 
agony, criminate some obnoxious persons ; if falsely, so 
much the better. She was tortured without uttering a 
cry, until the Lieutenant of the Tower would suffer his 
men to torture her no more ; and then two priests who 
were present actually pulled off their robes and turned 
the wheels of the rack with their own hands, so rending 
and twisting and breaking her that she was afterwards 
carried to the fire in a chair. She was burned with three 
others — a gentleman, a clergyman, and a tailor. 

Either the king became afraid of the power of the Duke 
of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, or they gave 
him some offence, but he resolved to pull them down, to 
follow all the rest who were gone. The son was tried 
first — of course for nothing — and defended himself 
bravely ; but of course he was found guilty, and of course 
he was executed. Then his father was laid hold of and 
left for death, too. 

But the king himself was left for death by a greater 
King, and the earth was to be rid of him at last. He was 
now a swollen, hideous spectacle, with a great hole in his 
leg, and so odious to every sense that it was dreadful to 
approach him. When he was found to be dying Cran- 
mer was sent for, and came, but found him speechless. 
Happily, in that hour he perished. He was in the fifty- 
sixth year of his age and thirty-eighth of his reign. 

Henry VIII. has been favored by some Protestant 
writers because the Reformation was achieved in his 
time. But the mighty merit of it lies with other men, 
and not with him, and it can be rendered none the 
worse by this monster's crimes, and none the better by 
any defence of them. The plain truth is that he was a 
most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and 
a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

EDWARD VI. 

Henry VIII. had made a will, which was set aside by 
the Earl of Hertford, who was made Protector of the 
young king. He was made Duke of Somerset, and then 
sent troops to Scotland to force the marriage between Mary 
and Edward. He did not bring back the young queen, who 
was sent to France to wed the Dauphin, Francis II. 

Somerset gave great aid to the Reformers. The king, 
who was but ten years old when he came to the throne, 
had been brought up by strong Protestants, and hence he 
held their views. He was quick, bright, and well schooled. 

The first foe Somerset had to deal with was his own 
brother Thomas, Lord Seymour, who was wed to the 
widow, Queen Katherine Parr. He was beheaded, and 
there were many who thought it horrible for one to send 
his brother to the block. 

He was harsh to the young king, and worse to the 
nobles, who at last leagued to get rid of him, and they 
did, and he was brought to the same block to which he 
had sent his brother. 

The Duke of Northumberland now took the helm of 
state. Of religion he had none, but he set up for a 
Protestant and was hailed with joy by the king's party. 
He got the dying Edward to change the right of succes- 
sion — a thing the king had no right to do, but was led to 
do by the fear that the new faith would not do well with 
his sister Mary. Edward settled the right to the crown 
on his cousin Jane Grey, whom Northumberland's fourth 
(160) 




SSS^^^SS 



Edward VI. 
11 



(161) 



162 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

son, Dudley, had just wed. By his prayers Edward gained 
the consent of Cranmer to this change. 

The king died in the sixteenth year of his age and in 
the seventh of his reign. It is difficult to judge what the 
character of one so young might afterwards have become 
among so many bad, ambitious, quarrelling nobles. But 
he was an amiable boy, of very good abilities, and had 
nothing coarse or cruel or brutal in his disposition, which, 
in the son of such a father, is rather surprising. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

MARY. 

The Duke of Northumberland intended to keep Ed- 
ward's death a secret till Mary and Elizabeth had been 
secured, but Mary's friends warned her, and she made her 
way at once to Norfolk. 

Jane Grey knew nothing of her uncle's schemes, and 
was amazed when he and four lords knelt to her as their 
queen. She was proclaimed, but her reign lasted but 
nine days. 

The land looked on Mary as the rightful heir and 
nocked round her. No voice was raised to cheer the duke 
as he rode out of the city at the head of his troops against 
Mary's forces. Not a blow was struck for Jane, and Mary 
entered London at the head of her friends. 

Her first act was to free the Duke of Norfolk, Bishop 
Gardner, and the other State captives. Northumberland 
was brought to trial and beheaded, and when he came to 
die he returned to his old faith. 

Mary was attached to the Church of Rome. Cranmer 




Mary. 



(163) 



164 HIS TO RY OF ENGLAND. 

and Latimer were sent to the Tower, and the Mass was 
said as of old. Her friends wished her to wed Philip 
Courtenay, Earl of Devon, but she had set her heart upon 
Philip of Spain. No one liked her choice. To stop the 
marriage, Thomas Wyatt raised troops in Kent and 
marched to London to seize the Queen. He made his 
way to London, but no one joined him, and at Temple Bar 
he gave himself up, and was beheaded with a lot of his 
friends. Jane Grey and Dudley were also beheaded. 

It was thought that Wyatt's idea was to raise Elizabeth 
to the throne and wed her to Courtenay. Some urged 
Mary to put Elizabeth to death, but as there was no proof 
that she knew what was being done, she was sent off 
to Woodstock. 

Philip came from Spain and married Mary. He was 
called King of England as long as Mary lived, but Parlia- 
ment would not grant that he should be crowned or made 
king if Mary died childless. 

The laws against heretics came in force once more. The 
fires were kindled, and more than two hundred persons, 
men and women, were burned at the stake. The people 
tired of this slaughter, and Mary has come down to us with 
the name of" bloody " fixed on her. Ridley and the aged 
Latimer were bound to the same stake and burned at 
Oxford. 

The marriage of Mary and Philip was a sad one. She 
doted on him, but he cared nothing for her. She was 
eleven years older than he. He went back to his own 
land as King of Spain, and came back once more to urge 
Mary to join him in a war against France. It turned out 
bad. The English lost Calais. It was no great loss, but it 
was a blow to English pride. 

There was a bad fever raging in England at this time, 
and I am glad to write that the queen took it, and the hour 
of her death came. " When I am dead and my body is 
opened," she said to those around her, "ye shall find 



MARY. 



165 



Calais written on my heart." I should have thought, if 
anything were written on it, they would have found the 
words, "Jane Grey, Hooper, Rogers, Ridley, Latimer, 
Cranmer, and three hundred people burnt alive within 




Queen Mary Watching the Execution of Lady Jane Grey. 



four years of my wicked reign, including sixty women 
and forty little children." But it is enough that their 
deaths were written in heaven. 

The queen died after reigning not quite five years and a 
half, and in the forty-fourth year of her age. Cardinal 
Pole died of the same fever next day. 

As Bloody Queen Mary this woman has become famous, 



166 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

and as bloody Queen Mary she will ever be justly remem- 
bered with horror and detestation in Great Britain. Her 
memory has been held in such abhorrence that some 
writers have arisen in later years to take her part, and to 
show that she was, upon the whole, quite an amiable and 
cheerful sovereign ! " By their fruits ye shall know them," 
said our Saviour. The stake and the fire were the fruits 
of this reign, and you will judge this queen by nothing 
else. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

ELIZABETH. 

There was great rejoicing when the lords went to hail 
the Princess Elizabeth as the new Queen of England. 
Weary of the barbarities of Mary's reign, the people looked 
with hope and gladness to the new sovereign. The nation 
seemed to wake from- a horrible dream ; and heaven, so 
long hidden by the smoke of the fires that roasted men 
and women to death, appeared to brighten once more. 

Queen Elizabeth was twenty-six years of age when she 
rode through the streets of London, from the Tower to 
Westminster Abbey, to be crowned. Her countenance 
was strongly marked, but on the whole commanding and 
dignified; her hair was red, and her nose something too 
long and sharp for a woman's. She was not the beautiful 
creature her courtiers made out, but she was well enough, 
and no doubt looked all the better for coming after the 
dark and gloomy Mary. She was well educated but a 
roundabout writer, and rather a hard swearer and coarse 
talker. She was clever, but cunning and deceitful, and 
inherited much of her father's violent temper. I mention 
this now because she has been so over-praised by one 




Elizabeth. 



(167} 



168 



HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



party and so over-abused by another that it is hardly pos- 
sible to understand the greater part of her reign without 
first understanding what kind of woman she really was. 

She began her reign with the great advantage of having 
a very wise and careful minister, Sir William Cecil, whom 
she afterwards made Lord Burleigh. 




Elizabeth and Her Courtiers. 

In religion her plan was to hold a middle place that 
should content all ; but willing or not, all had to bow to 
her system. She came, more by the force of things all 
around her than her own wish, the hope of the Reformers. 

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, came to be looked on as 
Elizabeth's heir, though she was left out of the will of 
Henry VIII. The Catholics regarded her as the rightful 
Queen of England, and she, when in France, took that 



ELIZABETH. 



169 



title. The Scots were in the main Protestants, but Mary 
was a Roman Catholic. She was a most lovely woman, 




Mary Stuart. 



and in craft she matched Elizabeth, but lacked her caution 
and tact. By her folly, if by no worse, she laid herself 
open to charges of great crimes, for which the Scotch lords 
forced her to give up her crown to her infant son, James 



170 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

VI., in the murder of whose father, Henry Stuart, Lord 
Darnley, she was thought to have a hand. She escaped 
from the Scots v who held her a captive, and fled to Eng- 
land and claimed Elizabeth's help. The English held her 
as a State prisoner. 

Round the lovely captive grew no end of plots formed 
by Catholics, who looked to Spain for help. In the North, 
where men still clung to the old faith, troops were raised. 
The)'' were at once put down, and punished with great 
vigor. A plan was formed to wed her to the Duke of Nor- 
folk, the chief noble in England. It leaked out, and the 
duke was beheaded. Pope Pius V. absolved Elizabeth's 
people from their fealty, but in the end this did more 
harm to the Pope's friends than to the queen. Mary had 
now been nineteen years a captive and there were calls 
for her death, and she was beheaded. In the previous 
year she sent word to Philip that she willed all her rights 
on England to him, and set aside her son, who had joined 
the Protestants. 

In her dealings with the States around her Elizabeth 
wavered and lied ; but queer as her acts seemed, she was 
constant to her aim to hold herself free and keep from war 
as long as she could. Philip strove to keep on good terms 
with her, but she aided, from time to time, his subjects who 
warred with him in the Netherlands. When they formed 
the United Provinces she sent to them aid headed by the 
Earl of Leicester. It did not do much, but it cost the life 
of Sir Philip Sidney. 

The strife with Spain was kept up by a set of men of 
much the same stamp as the Vikings of old. They sailed 
around the world and brought back their spoil to Eng- 
land. Drake went off with five ships and came back with 
but one, and that was loaded with gold and jewels, the 
spoils of Spanish towns and ships. Raleigh sailed to 
America and planted the land which he called Virginia, 
after the " Virgin Queen " (as Elizabeth was often called). 




The Spanish Armada. 



(171) 



172 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

He brought tobacco to England, and the potato to Ire- 
land. 

Spain had longed for years to invade England, and at 
last got ready the great Armada — that is, fleet — at the call 
of Pope Sixtus V., and it was looked on as a Holy War. 
All the great men of the time were in it. There were one 
hundred and fifty ships, and when Howard learned they 
were off the Cornish coast he came out with his sixty or 
seventy ships and hung on the foe's rear. Fresh ships 
came to him daily till he had one hundred and forty of 
them. His plan was not to have a close fight with the 
huge fleet that came up the Channel in the form of a half 
moon, but to press them with his small ships, that sailed 
twice as fast as theirs, and could come and go as they chose. 
The Spanish captain fought as he sailed, and anchored in 
Calais Woods. To drive him out eight ships were fired 
and sent drifting with wind and tide amid the Spaniards, 
who, seized with fear, cut their cables and set out to sea. 
Though the Spaniards fought well, their huge castle-ships 
were no match for the small and quick English ships. 

The Spaniards flew off to the North Sea. Howard and 
Drake clung to them till their stores of food ran short. 
Only fifty-four ships out of the one hundred and fifty 
lived to creep home. To the English, and to all Protest- 
ants, it seemed as though heaven had fought for them. 

Leicester died in the midst of the joy. Then came to 
the queen's favor and grace the Earl of Essex. He had 
done well at the head of the troops which took the town of 
Cadiz, in Spain, but he failed in Ireland. The queen found 
fault with him, so he left his post, unbidden, and came 
to see Elizabeth, who would not hear his pleas, but took 
his office from him and ordered him to stay indoors in his 
own house. He stayed there for a time, and then made a 
bad move when he tried to get back to power by force. 
He brought his friends around him and marched to Lon- 
don and called for aid, but none stirred to help him. He 



ELIZABETH. 173 

was caught, and fond though the queen was of him, she 
let him be beheaded. 

A story is told that Essex held a ring given him by the 
queen, and that he had been told, if ever he was in dan- 
ger, to send her the ring and she would save him. He sent 
the ring while he was in prison, but it was taken by mis- 
take to one of his bitter enemies, and was never delivered 
to the queen. She expected to receive the ring, and when 
it did not arrive, set it down to wilful obstinacy and signed 
the death-warrant of her kinsman and former favorite. 

One bad law at this time was that the crown could grant 
special trades to favored folks. Thus Essex had the sale 
of all sweet wines, from which he drew his vast wealth. 
In 1601 a list of these were read out in Parliament. Eliza- 
beth, though imperious, knew how to yield with grace, 
and to stop the coming trouble she sent word that she 
would call back all these special grants. 

In 1600 the famed East India Company was formed by 
a lot of London tradesmen, and from this sprang the 
British Dominions in India. 

The great queen was now drawing towards her end. She 
suffered greatly from gout in her hands and fingers. Yet she 
did not complain of pain, but looked forward to journeys 
and festivities as if she was to live for years. She moved 
from Whitehall to Richmond. At this time the story of 
the ring, which had been sent by Essex, but not delivered, 
was told to her, and her fury was terrible. 

After this she grew worse, and could not be persuaded 
to take food or to go to bed. She appeared almost insen- 
sible, not speaking above once in two or three hours, and 
at last was silent for a whole day, holding her finger almost 
all the time in her mouth, with her rayless eyes open and 
fixed on the ground, and she had grown very thin by long 
watching and fasting. When at last she was put to bed 
she revived, but soon afterwards became speechless. On 
the last night of her life the Lords of the Council came to 



174 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

her, being anxious about the succession. She was too 
feeble to speak, but it was arranged that she should make 
a sign when the name of her choice was mentioned. At 
the names of the King of France and the King of Scot- 
land she remained motionless. Robert Cecil, her chief 
minister, said she made signs at the last moment that 
James VI. of Scotland should have the throne. This is 
not sure, but he was proclaimed king. 

Thus died Elizabeth at the age of seventy. Her body 
was brought by water from Richmond to Whitehall, and 
she was interred at Westminster in the sight of a dense 
crowd. Her effigy lay upon the coffin in royal robes, 
with a crown on the head, and caused a general outburst 
of sighs, groans and tears. The image of the lion-hearted 
sovereign may still be seen in Westminster Abbey. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

JAMES I. 

" Our cousin of Scotland " was ugly, awkward, and 
shuffling, both in mind and person. His tongue was too 
large for his mouth, his legs were too weak for his body, 
and his dull, goggle-eyes stared and rolled like an idiot's. 
He was cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, 
dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited 
man on earth. His figure presented a ridiculous appear- 
ance, dressed in padded clothes, as a safeguard against 
being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), of a 
grass-green color, from head to foot, with a hunting-horn 
dangling at his side instead of a sword, and his hat and 
feathers sticking over one eye, or hanging on the back 
of his head, as he happened to toss it on. He used to loll 




JAMES I. 



( 1^5 ) 



176 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

on the necks of his favorite courtiers, and slobber their 
faces and kiss and pinch their cheeks. He was the worst 
rider ever seen, and thought himself the best. He was 
one of the most impertinent talkers (in the broadest 
Scotch) ever heard, and boasted of being unanswerable 
in all manner of argument. He wrote some wearisome 
treatises, and thought himself a prodigy of authorship. 
He thought and wrote and said that a king had a right 
to make and unmake what laws he pleased. This is the 
plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest 
man about the court praised and flattered to that degree 
that I doubt if there be anything much more shameful in 
the annals of human nature. 

He came to the English throne with great ease. The 
miseries of a disputed succession had been felt so dread- 
fully that he was proclaimed within a few hours of Eliza- 
beth's death, and was accepted by the nation without any 
pledge. He took a month to come from Edinburgh to 
London, and by way of exercising his new power 
hanged a pickpocket on the journey without any trial, 
and knighted everybody he could lay hold of. He made 
two hundred knights before he got to his palace in Lon- 
don, and seven hundred before he had been in it three 
months. He also put sixty-two new peers into the House 
of Lords, and there was a pretty large sprinkling of Scotch- 
men among them, you may believe. 

In the first year of his reign Walter Raleigh was con- 
demned to death on the charge of trying, with the help 
of Spain, to raise Arabella Stuart, the first cousin of James, 
to the throne. He was let off from death, and spent thir- 
teen years in a cell in the Tower. Arabella had no share 
in the plot, and was left alone for eight years, till she wed 
William Seymour, an heir of the Duchess of Suffolk. 
This union of two pretenders to the throne scared James, 
and Arabella was shut up in the Tower, where she went 
mad, and soon died. 



James i. 



171 



The bishops met and made a change in the prayer- 
book. A new translation of the Bible was made in 1611, 
and this is still the "authorized version." The Puritans 
did not like things as they were settled, but there was no 




Sir "Walter Baleioh. 



help for them, and the way in which the king and the 
bishops treated them did not tend to soothe matters. In 
fact, three hundred of their clergy were cleared out of the 
land. The Catholics fared no better, so they banded to blow 
up the Parliament, when it was opened by James, and the 

12 



178 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

Lords. A cellar under the House of Lords was hired and 
filled with powder. Guy Fawkes was the one fixed upon to 
set fire to the mine. There were thirteen of them in the plot, 
and the last man they took in was the cause of their ruin. 
His brother-in-law was a lord, and he was warned not to 
attend that day. He told Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and 
they looked into the case, and found Fawkes in the cellar. 
The day fixed upon to blow them all up was November 
5, 1605. When the news got out the chief men fled, but 
were caught and killed. The English now thought hard 
and bitterly of the Catholics, and put an end to any 
chance for them for hundreds of years. New and harsh 
laws were made to hold the "Papists " in check, and a 
new oath was put on them. Some took it, some would not. 

On Salisbury's death the Duke of Buckingham gained 
the king's good-will and was made chief man in the 
kingdom. The king's rule did not please the people. In 
1606 Raleigh was let out of prison to find a gold-mine 
that he claimed to know of. He was told to do no harm 
to the Spanish, but he got into a fight with some of them 
and burned one of their towns. He did not find the 
mine, and when he got back he was tried as a pirate, and 
on this charge was beheaded. This made the people mad. 
James was now at strife with the Lords. He did not want 
more power than Elizabeth and the Tudors had; but, 
while their acts pleased the people, his did not. 

In this reign Bacon was put out of office for taking 
bribes. James wanted to wed his daughter to the young 
King of Spain, but the people and the Lords did not want 
this and said so, and the match was broken off. King 
James died of ague, March 27, 1625. His son Charles 
came to the throne. 

James took the name of King of Great Britain, and on 
his flag he had the crosses of the saints of England and 
of Scotland. This was the first " Union Jack." 

There was strife in Ireland early in James's reign, and 



JAMES I. 



179 



the Irish were put down, and the lands in Ulster were 
granted to the English and Scotch troops. This made the 
trouble worse, as owners and clans were shipped off to 
other parts of the island. The Irish hated these settlers 



^5=5-- 



i 




Death of Raleigh. 



and longed for their own people and their own lords, 
harsh though these had been. 

In this reign, in 1620, was settled Jamestown, in Vir- 



180 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

ginia — the first colony of English in America. In the 
same year more bands of English, who had been cleared 
out of England and went to Holland, sailed for America, 
and landed in New England, and settled at Plymouth. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

CHAKLES I. 

King Charles I. came to the throne in the twenty-fifth 
year of his age. Unlike his father, he was amiable in his 
private character, and grave and dignified in his bearing ; 
but, like his father, he had monstrously exaggerated notions 
of the rights of a king, and was evasive and not to be 
trusted. If his word could have been relied upon, his 
history might have had a different end. 

Charles wed Henrietta Maria, daughter of the great 
King Henry IV. of France. Though this was less hated 
than if the queen were from Spain, she was not liked, as 
she was a Roman Catholic. 

Trouble broke out at once between Charles and the 
Lords. He wanted money for war with Spain; they 
wanted changes made in some harsh laws, and tried to 
force Buckingham from rule. Charles cleared out two 
Parliaments in one year, Buckingham, as he was on his 
way to fight France, was stabbed to death by one who 
thought he was doing a good act for his State. Though 
the duke was gone, the strife was kept up. Charles put 
taxes on the trade that came in and out of the land — 
tonnage it was called. This provoked the Commons, and 
they passed an act which said that he who paid these 
taxes was a foe to his land. Charles cleared out Parlia- 




Charles I. 



(181) 



182 r HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ment onco more, and sent the men who passed this act 
to prison, where some of them staid till their death. 

Charles made up his mind to rule without the help 
of Parliaments, and found two men high in the State to 
serve his ends. These were Thomas Wentworth and 
Laud, the Bishop of London. Wentworth had been op- 
posed to the king when in the Commons, but when he 
came to side with the king he was made a peer of the 
realm, and known as the Earl of Strafford. 

Charles got up a war with the Scotch, but was forced 
to patch up a truce. He called a Parliament, known as 
the "Short Parliament," which he threw out in twenty- 
three days; but the Scotch landed in England, and he 
had to call a new Parliament, since famed as the " Long 
Parliament." Strafford and Laud were both brought to 
trial for treason. Strafford was beheaded, and with him 
fell the rule he tried so hard to bring into force. 

In 1641 the Irish rose and put the English in Ulster to 
death. It was said that Charles helped this strife. All 
the Irish Catholics now rose as one man, both in England 
and Ireland. The king's harsh acts now ruined him. He 
marched with five hundred men to Parliament, and called 
for the arrest of the head men there who opposed his 
acts. They were warned of his coming and got out of 
the way; as Charles said, " the birds had flown." Some 
of the great men in the North locked their gates and 
would not let Charles come in. A lot of the Lords and 
Commons joined the king, who set up his flag, on which 
was " Give Cresar his due." War now began. The two 
bands were known as " Royalists," those for the king, and 
" Parliamentarians," or those who sided with the Parlia- 
ment, or, as they grew to be called, "Cavaliers" and 
" Roundheads." The last name was given to those Puri- 
tans who cropped their hair close, while the stylish way 
was to wear it long. The Northwest, which was wild and 
poor, was for the king ; while the busy Londoners and the 




HENRIETTA MARIA, WIFE OF CHARLES I. ( 183 ) 



184 



HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



rich from the East, were for Parliament. The first fight 
was at Edgehill, and things looked well for the king. One 
of the bravest of the Roundheads was Oliver Cromwel!, 
who raised a troop of horse known as the " Ironsides." 
He took in none but those whose hearts were with the 




Burial of Charles I. 



cause and who would bow to strict rule; he cared not 
with what church sects they acted. He was joined by a 
large band of Scots, and in a fierce fight at Marston Moor 
the king was routed. The next year the king and his 
friends were crushed in a fight at Naseby. Charles kept 
up the fight till the following spring, when he gave in to 
the Scots, who turned him over to the English. He was 
kept lodged in Hampton Court for some months by the 



186 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Puritan army. He got out, but feared for his life and 
gave up to the governor of the Isle of Wight, who placed 
him in Carrisbrooke Castle. The Scots tried to help him, 
and crossed to England, but were crushed out, and thus 
ended what was called the "Second Civil War." 

Parliament feared the army and tried to treat with 
Charles, but Cromwell and the troops took hold of the 
House and kept out those they did not like. Of one 
hundred and thirty-five members, less than seventy were 
in their seats ; Cromwell was one of these. The king was 
brought to this "high court," as they were called, and a 
sentence of death was passed upon " Charles Stuart, King 
of England," as " a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public 
enemy to the good people of the nation." The names of 
fifty-nine members were signed to the warrant for his exe- 
cution. Charles resigned himself to his fate. He was 
beheaded January 30, 1642. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

OLIVER CROMWELL. 

Before sunset on the memorable day on which King 
Charles I. was executed the House of Commons passed an 
act declaring it treason in any one to proclaim the Prince of 
Wales, or anybody else, King of England. Soon after- 
ward it declared that the House of Lords was useless and 
dangerous, and ought to be abolished. Having laid hold 
of some famous Royalists who had escaped from prison, 
and having beheaded the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Hol- 
land, and Lord Capel, they then appointed a Council of 
State to govern the country. It consisted of forty-one 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 



187 



members, of whom five were peers. Bradshaw was made 
president. The House of Commons also re-admitted meni- 




Oliver Cromwell. 



bers who had opposed the king's death, and made up its 
members to about a hundred and fifty. 

But it still had an army of more than forty thousand 
men to deal with, and a very hard task it was to manage 



188 HIS TOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

them. Before the king's execution the army had ap- 
pointed some of its officers to remonstrate between them 
and the Parliament, and now the common soldiers began 
to take that office upon themselves. The regiments under 
orders for Ireland mutinied; one troop of horse in the 
city of London seized their own flag, and refused to obey 
orders. For this the ringleader was shot, which did not 
mend the matter, for both his comrades and the people 
made a public funeral for him. Cromwell was the only 
man to deal with these difficulties, and he cut them short 
by bursting at midnight into the town where the mutineers 
were sheltered, taking four hundred of them prisoners, 
and shooting a number of them by sentence of court-mar- 
tial. The soldiers soon found that Oliver was not a man to 
be trifled with. 

The Scottish Parliament did not know Oliver yet; so, 
on hearing of the king's execution, it proclaimed the 
Prince of Wales King Charles II., on condition of his re- 
specting the Solemn League and Covenant. Charles was 
abroad at that time, and so was Montrose, from whose help 
he had hopes. These hopes were soon ended ; for Mont- 
rose, having raised a few hundred exiles in Germany, and 
landed with them in Scotland, found that the people there, 
instead of joining him, deserted the country at his ap- 
proach. He was taken prisoner and carried to Edinburgh. 
He was sentenced by the Parliament to be hanged on a 
gallows thirty feet high, to have his head set on a spike in 
Edinburgh, and his limbs distributed in other places, 
according to the old, barbarous manner. He went to the 
scaffold at thirty-eight } T ears of age. The breath was scarcely 
out of his body when Charles denied that he had ever 
given him orders to rise in his behalf. O, the family fail- 
ing was strong in that Charles then ! 

Oliver commanded the army in Ireland, where he took 
a terrible revenge for the rebellion, and made tremendous 
havoc, particularly in the siege of Drogheda, where no 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 189 

quarter was given, and where he found at least a thousand 
of the inhabitants shut up together in the great church, 
every one of whom was killed by his soldiers, usually 
known as Oliver's Ironsides. There were numbers of 
friars and priests among them, and Oliver gruffly wrote 
home in his despatch that they were "knocked on the 
head," like the rest. 

But Charles got over to Scotland, and the Parliament 
called Oliver home to knock the Scottish men on the 
head for setting up that prince. Oliver left his son-in- 
law, Ireton, in Ireland, and he imitated the example of 
his father-in-law with such good-will that he brought the 
country to subjection, and laid it at the feet of the Parlia- 
ment. In the end, they passed an act for the settlement 
of Ireland, generally pardoning all the common people 
but exempting from this grace such of the wealthier sort 
as had been concerned in the rebellion or in any killing 
of Protestants, or who refused to lay down their arms. 
Great numbers of Irish left the country to serve under 
Catholic powers abroad, and a quantity of land was de- 
clared to have been forfeited by past offences and was 
given to people who had lent money to the Parliament 
early in the war. These were sweeping measures, but if 
Cromwell had had his own way fully he would have done 
more yet. 

Scotland, where Charles had arrived, and where he was 
accepted as king, was next invaded by Cromwell. But he 
could not bring the Scots to battle. His troops were sick 
and lacked food, and he fell back on Dunbar. In front of 
him were the Scots, and in the back of him was the sea, 
and on his left the Scots had hold of the pass that led to 
England. Cromwell met them and said, "Now let God 
arise, and His foes shall be scattered." And scattered the 
Scots were, in utter rout. In the next year, while Crom- 
well was still in Scotland, Charles and his troops crossed 
the border, and though his hopes of a rising in their favor 



190 H1STOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

were disappointed, they pushed as far as Worcester, where 
Cromwell came up to and whipped them. This was his 
last fight. The Earl of Derby and others suffered death. 
Charles got off. A large sum was offered for his capture. 
He went through great adventures, in which he placed 
himself in the hands of more than forty persons, none of 
whom failed in faith or care. He was hunted all over the 
land by the troops for the reward of a thousand pounds. 
After many perils he crossed in a small boat and landed 
in Normandy. General Monk kept up the war in Scotland, 
and forced them to bow to the English Parliament. 

Strife now rose up with the Dutch. This war is famed 
for the great sea-fight between Blake and Tromp. Once 
Blake was worsted, and Tromp sailed up the Channel 
with a broom at the top of his masthead, to mean that he 
had swept the seas clear of the English. In the next sea- 
fight Tromp fell. Peace was made with the Dutch the 
next year. 

Now came back the old trouble between the troops and 
the Parliament — the "Rump," as the remnant of the 
House of Commons came to be called in scorn. There 
was a great war of words between the head men of both 
sides, when Cromwell with his troops closed the House and 
locked its doors. Cromwell was now the sole head of the 
whole of England, the one check on him being the troops. 
These troops prayed and preached together, and lived, as 
was said, " like a band of monks." Proud as these men 
were of Cromwell, they would ill have borne that he should 
take on him the name, hated by most of them, of king. 
A new Council of State was held, and Cromwell, who acted 
with the advice of his officers, called a hundred and forty 
men by name, to serve in this Assembly, known as " the 
Little Parliament," or as the Cavaliers nicknamed it, 
" Praise - God - Barebones - Parliament," from the quaint 
name of one of its members. Five months later they gave 
up all power to Cromwell, who was made by his officers 



OLIVER CROMWELL. 



191 



Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scot- 
land and Ireland (December 16, 1653). There was to be 



«* 




THE BREAKING UP OF PARLIAMENT. 



an elected Parliament of but one House; all who had 
aided the king were barred out. 



1 9 2 HIS TOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

With few friends but the troops, Oliver — for king-like 
he styled himself by his Christian name — had for foes all 
the king's friends, and the Republicans who considered 
that he had put an end to the Commonwealth. Plots of 
both sides were crushed, but the Cavaliers were put to 
death or sold for slaves in the West Indies. Plots were 
made to kill the Protector, but his rule was too strong and 
vigilant to be shaken off. His first Parliament questioned 
his authority, and were packed off by him in rage. The 
next met and voted that he should take the title of 
king; but there were many in the army who objected to 
this, and he thought it best to refuse. Most of all the old 
forms came back with new names. Once more there were 
to be two Houses of Parliament. The " other house," as 
the Commons called it, was to be a House of Lords, but 
it did not work well. A few of the old nobles were called 
in, but they held off. Cromwell's two sons were made 
lords, as well as others of the Parliament's friends. The 
Commons raised so much trouble in granting these titles 
of lords that Cromwell ended the Parliament, saying, " Let 
God judge between you and me." It was a fatal error, but 
for the moment all went well. 

In the midst of his triumph Cromwell's heart was in 
fact heavy with the sense of failure. He had no desire to 
play the tyrant, nor had he any belief in the permanence 
of a mere tyranny. He was planning to call another Par- 
liament, but before he could conclude what to do he felt 
his overtaxed strength giving way. He was at the height 
of his power. He seemed to have placed his government 
on a legal and national basis. Never had the fame of an 
English ruler stood higher; but in the midst of his glory 
the hand of death was falling on the Protector. Vigorous 
and full of energy as his life seemed, his health was not as 
strong as his will. He saw too clearly the chaos into 
which his death would plunge England, to be willing to 
die. Said he, " I would be willing to live to be of further 




( 193 ) 



194 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

service to God and His people, but my work is done !" 
He died on September 3, 1658. So strong a hold had he 
over the minds of men that his son Richard was peace- 
ably accepted as the new Protector, much to the wonder 
of the excited Royalists. 

Richard was a weak and worthless man, but the bulk 
of the nation was content to be ruled by one who was at 
any rate no soldier, no Puritan, and no innovator. He 
was known to be lax and worldly in his conduct, and was 
believed to be conservative and even royalist in heart. 
His council called for a new Parliament on the old system 
of election. The army demanded the appointment of a 
soldier as its general in the place of the new Protector, 
who had assumed the command. They resolved to set 
aside Richard, whose weakness was now evident. The 
house was soon at strife with the soldiers, and the people 
grew tired of military rule. Monk, the commander of the 
Scottish army, threatened to march on London. His atti- 
tude aroused England to action. He entered London un- 
opposed, and from the moment of his entry the restoration 
of the Stuarts became inevitable. It was found that Monk 
had been in treaty with the exiled court. Charles's promise 
of a general pardon, religious toleration, and satisfaction 
to the army, was received with a burst of national enthu- 
siasm, and the old Constitution was restored by a solemn 
vote of the Convention, " that according to the ancient 
and fundamental laws of this kingdom the government is 
and ought to be by King, Lords, and Commons." The 
king was invited to hasten to his realm. He landed at 
Dover, and made his way, amidst the shouts of a great 
multitude, to Whitehall. " It is my own fault," laughed 
the new king, with irony, " that I had not come back 
sooner, for I find nobody who does not tell me he has 
always longed for my return." 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

CHARLES II. 

There never were such profligate times in England as 
under Charles II. Whenever you see his portrait, with 
his swarthy, ill-looking face and great nose, you may 
fancy him in his court, surrounded by some of the very 
worst vagabonds in the kingdom (though they were lords 
and ladies), drinking, gambling, indulging in vicious con- 
versation, and committing every kind of profligate excess. 
It has been a fashion to call Charles II. "The Merry 
Monarch." Let me try to give you a general idea of some 
of the merry things that were done in the merry days 
when this merry gentleman sat upon his merry throne, in 
merry England. 

The first merry proceeding was, of course, to declare 
that he was one of the greatest, the wisest, and the noblest 
kings that ever shone, like the blessed sun itself, on this 
benighted earth. The next merry and pleasant piece of 
business was for the Parliament to give him twelve hun- 
dred thousand pounds a year, and to settle upon him for 
life that old, disputed tonnage and poundage which had 
been so bravely fought for. Then General Monk, being 
made Earl of Albemarle, and a few royalists similarly re- 
warded, the law went to work to see what was to be done 
to those persons (they were called regicides) who had been 
concerned in making a martyr of the late king. Ten of 
these were merrily executed ; that is to say, six of the 
judges, one of the council, two officers who commanded 
the guards, and a preacher who had preached against the 
martyr with all his heart. These executions were so ex- 

(195) 



196 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

tremely merry that every horrible circumstance which 
Cromwell had abandoned was revived with appalling 
cruelty. The hearts of the sufferers were torn out of their 
living bodies ; their bowels were burned before their faces; 
the executioner cut jokes to the next victim as he rubbed 
his filthy hands together, that were reeking with the blood 
of the last, ai\d the heads of the dead were drawn on 
sledges with the living to the place of suffering. Still, 
even so merry a monarch could not force one of these dy- 
ing men to say that he was sorry for what he had done. 
Nay, the most memorable thing said among them was, that 
if the thing were to do again they would do it. 

Sir Harry Vane, who had furnished the evidence against 
Strafford and was one of the most stanch of the Repub- 
licans, was also tried, found guilty, and ordered for execu- 
tion. When he came upon the scaffold on Tower Hill, 
after conducting his own defence with great power, his 
notes of what he had meant to say to the people were torn 
away from him, and the drums and trumpets were ordered 
to sound lustily and drown his voice, for the people had 
been so much impressed by what the regicides had calmly 
said with their last breath that it was the custom now to 
have the drums and trumpets always under the scaffold, 
ready to strike up. Vane said no more than this : " It is 
a bad cause which cannot bear the words of a dying man," 
and bravely died. 

These merry scenes were succeeded by another perhaps 
even merrier. On the anniversary of the late king's death 
the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were 
torn out of their graves in Westminster Abbey, dragged to 
Tyburn, hanged there on a gallows all day long, and then 
beheaded. Imagine the head of Oliver Cromwell set upon 
a pole to be stared at by a brutal crowd, not one of whom 
would have dared to look the living Oliver in the face for 
half a moment ! Think, after you have read this reign, 
what England was under Oliver Cromwell, who was torn 




Charles II. 



(197) 



198 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

out of his grave, and what it was under this merry mon- 
arch, who sold it, like a merry Judas, over and over again. 

Of course the remains of Oliver's wife and daughter 
were not to be spared either, though they had been excel- 
lent women. The base clergy gave up their bodies, which 
had been buried in the Abbey, and they were thrown into 
a pit, together with the mouldering bones of Pym and of 
the brave and bold Admiral Blake. 

The clergy acted this disgraceful part because they 
hoped to get the dissenters thoroughly put down in this 
reign, and to have but one prayer-book and one service 
for all kinds of people, no matter what their private 
opinions were. This was pretty well for a Protestant 
Church, which had displaced the Romish Church because 
people had a right to their own opinions in religious 
matters. However, they carried it with a high hand, and 
a prayer-book was agreed upon in which the extremest 
opinions of Archbishop Laud were not forgotten. An act 
was passed, too, preventing any dissenter from holding any 
office under any corporation. So the regular clergy, in 
their triumph, were soon as merry as the king. The army 
being by this time disbanded and the king crowned, every- 
thing was to go on easily for evermore. 

Charles had not been long upon the throne when his 
brother and his sister died of small-pox. His remaining 
sister, the Princess Henrietta, married the Duke of Orleans, 
the brother of Louis XIV., King of France. His brother 
James, Duke of York, was made high admiral, and by 
and by became a Catholic. He was a gloomy, sullen, 
bilious sort of man, with a remarkable partiality for the 
ugliest women in the country. He married, under very 
discreditable circumstances, Anne Hyde, the daughter of 
Lord Clarendon, then the king's principal minister, who 
did much of the dirty work of a very dirty palace. It 
became important that the king should be married, and 
divers monarchs proposed their daughters to him. The 



CHARLES II. 



199 



King of Portugal offered his daughter, Catherine of Bra- 
ganza, and fifty thousand pounds; in addition to which 
the French king, who was favorable to that match, offered 
a loan of another fifty thousand. The King of Spain, on 




Henrietta, Daughter of Charles T. 

the other hand, offered any one out of a dozen of 
princesses and other hopes of gain. But the ready money 
carried the day, and Catherine came over in state to her 
merry marriage. 

The whole court was a great flaunting crowd of de- 
bauched men and shameless women, and Catharine's 
merry husband insulted and outraged her in every possi- 



200 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ble way until she consented to receive those worthless 
creatures as her very good friends and to degrade herself 
by their companionship. A Mrs. Palmer, whom the king 
made Lady Castlemaine, and afterwards Duchess of Cleve- 
land, was one of the most powerful of the bad women 
about the court, and had great influence with the king 
nearly all through his reign. Another merry lady, named 
Moll Davies, a dancer at the theatre, was afterwards her 
rival. So was Nell Gwynn, first an orange-girl and then an 
actress, who really had good in her, and of whom one of 
the worst things is that actually she did seem to have been 
fond of the king. The first Duke of St. Albans was this 
orange-girl's child. In like manner the son of a merry 
waiting-lady, whom the king created Duchess of Ports- 
mouth, became the Duke of Richmond. Upon the whole, 
it is not so bad a thing to be a commoner. 

The Merry Monarch was so exceedingly merry, among 
these merry ladies and some equally merry (and equally 
infamous) lords and gentlemen, that he soon got through 
his money, and then, by way of raising more, made a 
merry bargain. He sold Dunkirk to the French king for 
five millions of livres. When I think of the dignity to 
which Oliver Cromwell raised England in the eyes of for- 
eign powers, and when I think of the manner in which he 
gained for England this very Dunkirk, I am much inclined 
to consider that if the Merry Merry Monarch had been 
made to follow his father for this action, he would have 
received his just deserts. 

In the new Parliament the cavaliers held many votes. 
They passed a law and made all swear that it was in all 
cases against the good of the realm to take up arms against 
the king. The bishops had got back to their sees and 
were now back in their seats in the House of Lords. 
Charles held out hopes of changes to be made in the 
church laws that would please the new Presbyterians, but 
the Parliament would make more. 



202 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

In place of making it easy they passed a harsh law, 
which made all who held church offices declare their as- 
sent to everything in the Book of Common Prayer. This 
drove out thousands from their churches, as the royalists 
had been turned out before. Harsh acts were passed to 
force the Nonconformists, as they were called, to come in. 
With Charles I. they tried to fashion the church to suit 
their views. With Charles II. they made up their minds 
to stand outside, and asked but for leave to " dissent " from 
the church. 

Charles, for the sake of his Roman Catholic friends, did 
not want to be hard on dissent, but his motive was sus- 
pected. He put out a law that Protestant dissenters should 
be left to meet in places licensed for the purpose, and 
Catholics could worship in private houses. This Parlia- 
ment would not grant. 

They held out and he was forced to assent to a Test Act, 
which, though it shut out the Nonconformists from place, 
was aimed at the Catholics. With this act, all who held 
place in the church or troops had to take oaths of supremacy 
and allegiance, and to communicate according to the An- 
glican rites. Rather than do this, the king's brother, 
James, the Duke of York, gave up his place, by which act 
he showed himself to be, as he was long thought to be, a 
Roman Catholic. 

In most parts of the land the king's rule was bowed 
to. Scotland once more became a separate realm. In 
Ireland they had to settle the old strife between the Crom- 
wellians and the native race, and the Cromwellians were 
forced to give up one-third of their gains; but lots of them 
who swore they had no share in the Rebellion were left 
unhelped, and this tended to keep alive the old strife. 

In 1665, in a hot and dry summer, broke out the great 
plague, with a fury such as had not been known for three 
hundred years. The court and most of the rich fled. 
Monk was the only man that stayed. The troops were 



CHARLES II. 



203 



shut up, and grass grew in the streets; rows of houses 
stood empty, or marked on the doors with a red cross and 
the words " Lord have mercy on us!" which meant those 
within were struck down with the plague. By winter the 
worst was over, but in the six months that had passed it 
was said more than a hundred thousand died. 




The Great London Fire. 



The plague had just passed, when out burst a great fire 
in London — a blaze that made the night as day for ten 
miles around. The king and Duke of York worked hard ; 
they had the houses pulled down; some they blew up 
with powder. At last, when wide gaps were made in the 
streets, the wind ceased and the fire was stopped, but not 
till it had burned for three days and laid London in ashes 



204 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

from the Tower to the Temple. The pillar known as the 
"Monument" marks the spot where the fire first started. 
Old St. Paul's was one of the buildings that perished. It 
was replaced by the present great church. 

These bad years were followed by wars on the seas with 
the Dutch. One fight lasted for four days. In 1667, a 
Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway, burned the English 
ships, and blocked up the Thames. A queer thing in this 
fight was that English sailors served on the Dutch ships. 
This was because they had not been paid. Peace was soon 
made. 

Parliament wanted to know how the funds voted for the 
war had been spent. Charles was forced to throw over 
Clarendon, his chief man, who fled and died in exile. 
The king's advisers now formed the Triple Alliance — 
England, Holland and Sweden — to check Louis XIV. 
But Charles secretly sold himself to Louis. He agreed to 
declare that he was a Roman Catholic as soon as he 
thought it was safe to do so, and to join in the war against 
Holland. He was to be paid large sums by Louis, and be 
helped if any row broke out in England. 

The war with Holland broke out in 1672, and was ended 
in 1674. In 1678 the land was made wild by a " Popish 
Plot" to kill the King and all the Protestants. Titus 
Oates, a man of bad repute, was the witness, and for pelf 
he swore away the lives of many innocent Catholics. 
Now was passed an Act to shut out all Catholics but the 
Duke of York from the King's presence. They had long 
been held out of Parliament by the Test Act, but now the 
Catholic Peers ceased to take their seats. Both the Lords 
and the Commons were now made to take the oath, and 
to declare against the worship of the Church of Rome. 

The Parliament, having lasted for eight years, was at 
last dissolved. The one that came next lasted less than a 
year, but to it we owe the famous Habeas Corpus Act. 
This was to force the Government to bring a man who had 




" r/^ 

Death of Charles II. 



(205) 



206 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

been long in prison to trial at court, and show why he was 
kept confined. In times of great public fear this act is 
sometimes suspended. 

The names Whigs and Tories now rose up. The Whigs 
were those bent on keeping the Duke of York from the 
throne, on account of his faith. The Tories were against 
this scheme. Their name came from the Catholic outlaws 
who haunted the bogs of Ireland. 

The king had no legal heirs. The eldest of his sons was 
James, Duke of Monmouth, the " Protestant Duke/' as he 
was called by the common folks, who loved him for his 
easy grace and winning manners. In three Parliaments the 
Whigs pursued their scheme for an '' Exclusion Bill " 
against the Duke of York. 

The king grew vexed, threw out the Parliament, and for 
four years got on without one. Louis XIV. kept him in 
funds to carry on the court and State. The king resolved 
to take their charters from the strongholds of the Whigs, 
and London was placed under the king's rule, and could 
have no mayor or other officer without the king's assent. 

This brought out more plots. Those who took part in 
them were betrayed, and Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney 
were hurried to the block. Monmouth fled. The Duke of 
York again took up his office, the king putting aside the 
Test Act. While wondering what to do next, Charles was 
seized with a fit, and died February 6, 1683. The Bishops 
pressed him in vain to take the Sacraments. James 
brought in a monk, from whose hands he received the last 
rites of the Church of Rome. 

The people mourned him with real sorrow, for with all 
his faults he never lost their good-will, and they dreaded 
James when he came to rule. 

On Monday, February 2, 1685, the merry pensioner and 
servant of the King of France fell down in a fit of apo- 
plexy. By Wednesday his case was hopeless, and he 
was told so. As he made a difficulty about taking the 



JAMES II. 207 

sacrament from the Protestant Bishop of Bath, the Duke 
of York got all who were present away from the bed, and 
asked his brother, in a whisper, if he should send for a 
Catholic priest? The king replied, "For God's sake, 
brother, do !" The duke smuggled in, up the back stairs, 
disguised in a wig and gown, a priest who had saved the 
king's life after the battle of Worcester — telling him that 
this worthy man in the wig had once saved his body and 
was now come to save his soul. 

The Merry Monarch lived through that night and died 
before noon on the next day (Friday). Two of the last 
tbings he said were of a human sort, and your remem- 
brance will give him the full benefit of them. When the 
queen sent to say she was too unwell to attend him and 
to ask his pardon, he said, "Alas, poor woman, sk beg 
my pardon ! I beg hers with all my heart. Take back 
that answer to her." And he also said, in reference to 
Nell Gwynn, " Do not let poor Nelly starve." 

He died in the fifty-fifth year of his age and in the 
twenty-fifth of his reign. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

JAMES II. 

King James II. was a man so very disagreeable that by 
comparison his brother Charles was quite a pleasant char- 
acter. The one object of his short reign was to re-estab- 
lish the Catholic religion, and this he doggedly pursued 
with such a stupid obstinacy that his career very soon 
came to a close. 

He assured his council that he would make it his en- 
deavor to preserve the government, both in the Church 



208 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

and State, as it was by law established, and that he would 
defend and support the Church. Great public acclama- 
tions were raised over this fair speech, and a great deal 
was said from the pulpits and elsewhere about the word 
of a king which was never broken. With tears of joy in 
his eyes he received, as the beginning of his pension from 
the King of France, five hundred thousand livres ; yet, 
with a mixture of meanness and arrogance that belonged 
to his contemptible character, he was always jealous of 
making some show of being independent of the King 
of France while he pocketed his money. Notwithstand- 
ing his open display of himself attending mass, the Par- 
liament was very obsequious, and granted him a large 
sum of money, and he began his reign with a belief that 
he could do what he pleased and with a determination to 
do it. 

Before we proceed to its principal events let us dispose 
of Titus Oates. He was tried for perjury a fortnight after 
the coronation and was sentenced to stand twice in the 
pillory, to be whipped from Alclgate to Newgate one day, 
and from Newgate to Tyburn two days afterwards, and to 
stand in the pillory five times a year as long as he lived. 
This fearful sentence was actually inflicted on the rascal. 
Being unable to stand after his first flogging, he was 
dragged on a sledge from Newgate to Tyburn and flogged 
as he was drawn along. He was so strong a villain that 
he did not die under the torture, but lived to be after- 
wards pardoned and rewarded, though not to be ever 
believed in any more. 

As soon as James was on the throne, Argyle and Mon- 
mouth went from Brussels to Rotterdam and attended a 
meeting of Scottish exiles to concert measures for a rising 
in England. Argyle was to land in Scotland and Mon- 
mouth in England. 

Argyle was the first to act ; but two of his men being 
taken prisoners, the government became aware of his in- 




James II. 
14 



( 209) 



210 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

tention, and was able to act against him with such vigor 
as to prevent his raising more than two or three thousand 
Highlanders, although he sent a fiery cross from clan to 
clan and from glen to glen, as the custom then was when 
those wild people were to be excited by their chiefs. As 
he was moving towards Glasgow with his small force he 
was betrayed by some of his followers, taken, and carried, 
with his hands tied behind his back, to his old prison in 
Edinburgh Castle. James ordered him to be executed on 
his old, shamefully unjust sentence within three days ; he 
was beheaded, and his head was set upon the top of Edin- 
burgh jail. 

Monmouth, partly through being detained and partly 
through idling his time away, was five or six weeks behind 
his friend when he landed in Dorset. He set up his 
standard in the market-place, and proclaimed the king a 
tyrant and a popish usurper, charging him not only with 
what he had done, which was bad enough, but with what 
neither he nor anybody else had done, such as setting fire 
to London and poisoning the late. king. Raising some 
four thousand men by these means, he marched on to 
Taunton, where there were many Protestant dissenters 
who were strongly opposed to the Catholics. Here both 
the rich and the poor turned out to receive him, and every 
compliment and honor that could be devised was showered 
upon him. 

Encouraged by this homage he proclaimed himself 
king, and went on to Bridgewater. But here the govern- 
ment troops, under the Earl of Feversham, were close at 
hand, and he was so dispirited at finding that he made 
but few powerful friends after all, that it was a question 
whether he should disband his army and endeavor to es- 
cape. It was resolved to make a night attack on the king's 
army as it lay encamped on the edge of a morass called 
Sedgemoor. The horsemen were commanded by Lord 
Grey, who was not a brave man. He gave up the battle 



JAMES II. 



211 



almost at the first obstacle, and although the poor country- 
men who had turned out for Monmouth fought bravely 
with scythes, poles, pitchforks, and such weapons as they 




James, Duke of Monmouth. 

had, they were soon dispersed by the trained soldiers and 
fled in all directions. When Monmouth himself fled was 
not known in the confusion, but Grey was taken early 
next day, and then another of the party was taken, who 
confessed that he had parted from the duke only four 



212 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

hours before. Strict search being made, he was found 
disguised as a peasant, hidden in a ditch under fern and 
nettles, with a few peas in his pocket which he had gath- 
ered in the fields to eat. He was completely broken. He 
wrote a miserable letter to the king, beseeching and en- 
treating to be allowed to see him. When he was taken to 
London and conveyed bound into the king's presence, he 
crawled to him on his knees and made a most degrading 
exhibition. As James never forgave or relented towards 
anybody, he told the suppliant to prepare for death. 

This unfortunate favorite of the people was taken out 
to die on Tower Hill. The crowd was immense, and the 
tops of all the houses were covered with gazers. Before 
laying his head upon the block he felt the edge of the axe, 
and told the executioner that he feared it was not sharp 
enough and that the axe was not heavy enough. On the 
executioner replying that it was of the proper kind the 
duke said, " I pray you have a care, and do not use me 
so awkwardly as you used my Lord Russell." The execu- 
tioner, made nervous by this, and trembling, struck once, 
and merely gashed him in the neck. Upon this the Duke 
of Monmouth raised his head and looked the man re- 
proachfully in the face. Then he struck twice, and then 
thrice, and then threw down the axe and cried out in a 
voice of horror that he could not finish that work. The 
sheriffs, however, threatening him with what should be 
done to himself if he did not, he took it up again and struck 
a fourth time and a fi^th time. Then the wretched head at 
last fell off, and James, Duke of Monmouth, was dead, in 
the thirty-sixth year of his age. He was a showy, graceful 
man, with many popular qualities, and had found much 
favor in the open hearts of the English. 

The atrocities committed by the government which fol- 
lowed this Monmouth rebellion form the blackest and 
most lamentable page in English history. The poor 
peasants, having been dispersed with great loss and their 



JAMES 11 213 

leaders taken, one would think that the implacable king 
might have been satisfied. But no; he let loose upon 
them a Colonel Kirk, who had served against the Moors, 
and whose soldiers— called by the people Kirk's lambs, 
because they bore a lamb upon their flag, as the emblem 
of Christianity — were worthy of their leader. The atroci- 
ties committed by these demons in human shaj:>e are far 
too horrible to be related here. Besides most ruthlessly 
murdering and robbing them, and ruining them by making 
them buy their pardons at the price of all they possessed, 
it was one of Kirk's amusements, as he and his officers sat 
drinking after dinner, to have batches of prisoners hanged 
outside the windows for the company's diversion. The 
detestable king informed him that he was " very well sat- 
isfied with his proceedings." But the king's great delight 
was in the proceedings of Jeffreys, now a peer, who went 
down into the West, with four other judges, to try persons 
accused of having had any share in the rebellion. The 
king pleasantly called this "Jeffreys' campaign." The 
people down in that part of the country remember it to 
this day as the Bloody Assize. 

It began at Winchester, where a poor, deaf old lady, the 
widow of one of the judges of Charles L, was charged with 
having given shelter to two fugitives from Sedgemoor. 
Three times the jury refused to find her guilty, until Jef- 
freys bullied and frightened them into that false verdict. 
When he had extorted it from them, he said, " Gentlemen, 
if I had been one of you, and she had been my own 
mother, I would have found her guilty," as I daresay he 
would. **-He sentenced her to be burned alive that very 
afternoon. The clergy of the cathedral interfered in her 
favor, and she was beheaded within a week. As a high 
mark of his approbation the king made Jeffreys Lord 
Chancellor. It is astonishing, when we read of the enor- 
mous injustice and barbarity of this beast, to know that 
no one struck him dead on the judgment-seat. It was 



214 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

enough for any man or woman to be accused by an enemy 
before Jeffreys to be found guilty of high treason. One man 
who pleaded not guilty he ordered to be taken out of court 
upon the instant and hanged, and this so terrified the 
prisoners that they mostly pleaded guilty at once. At Dor- 
chester alone, in the course of a few days, Jeffreys hanged 
eighty people, besides whipping, transporting, imprison- 
ing and selling as slaves great numbers. He executed 
nearly three hundred in all. 

These executions took place among the neighbors and 
friends of the sentenced in thirty-six towns and villages. 
The bodies were mangled, steeped in caldrons of boiling 
pitch and tar, and hung up by the roadsides, in the streets, 
over the very churches. The sight and smell of heads 
and limbs, the hissing and bubbling of the infernal cal- 
drons, and the tears and terrors of the people were dread- 
ful beyond all description. One rustic, who was forced to 
steep the remains in the black pot, was ever afterwards 
called "Tom Boilman." The hangman has ever since 
been called Jack Ketch, because a man of that name went 
hanging and hanging, all day long, in the train of Jeffreys. 
You will hear much of the horrors of the great French 
Revolution. Many and terrible they were, there is no 
doubt; but I know nothing worse done by the maddened 
people of France in that awful time than was done by 
the highest judge in England, with the express approval 
of the King of England, in the Bloody Assize. 

Nor was even this all. Jeffreys was as fond of money 
for himself as of misery for others, and he sold pardons to 
fill his pockets. The king ordered a thousand prisoners 
to be given to certain of his favorites in order that they 
might bargain with them for their pardons. When Jef- 
freys had done his worst and came home again, he was 
complimented in the Royal Gazette, and when the king 
heard that through drunkenness and raging he was very 
ill, his odious majesty remarked that such another man 



JAMES II. 



215 



could not easily be found in England. Besides all this, a 
former sheriff of London, named Cornish, was hanged 
within sight of his own house, after an abominably-con- 
ducted trial, for having had a share in the Rye House plot, 
on evidence given by Rumsey which was directly opposed 




In the Time of James II. 

to the evidence he had given on the trial of Lord Russell. 
And on the very same day a worthy widow was burned 
alive at Tyburn for having sheltered a wretch who him- 
self gave evidence against her. She settled the fuel about 
herself with her own hands, so that the flames should 
reach her quickly, and nobly said with her last breath 
that she had obeyed the sacred commands of God to give 
refuge to the outcast and not to betray the wanderer. 



216 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

After all this hanging, beheading, burning, boiling, mu- 
tilating, exposing, robbing, transporting and selling into 
slavery of his unhappy subjects, the king not unnaturally 
thought that he could do whatever he would. So he went 
to work to change the religion of the country with all pos- 
sible speed, and what he did was this. 

He first tried to get rid of the Test Act — which prevented 
the Catholics from holding public employments — by his 
own power of dispensing with the penalties. He tried it in 
one case, and eleven of the twelve judges deciding in his 
favor, he exercised it in three others, being those of three 
dignitaries of University College, Oxford, who had become 
papists, and whom he kept in their places. He revived 
the hated Ecclesiastical Commission, to get rid of Comp- 
ton, Bishop of London, who manfully opposed him. He 
solicited the pope to favor England with an ambassador, 
which the pope (who was a sensible man then) rather un- 
willingly did. He favored the establishment of convents 
in several parts of London. He was delighted to have 
the streets, and even the court itself, filled with monks and 
friars in the habits of their orders. He endeavored to 
make Catholics of the Protestants about him. He held 
private interviews, which he called " closetings," with 
those members of Parliament who held offices, to persuade 
them to consent to the design he had in view. When they 
did not consent, they were removed and their places given 
to Catholics. He displaced Protestant officers from the 
army and got Catholics into their places, too. He tried 
the same thing with the corporations, and also with the lord 
lieutenants of counties. To terrify the people into the en- 
durance of all these measures, he kept an army of fifteen 
thousand men encamped on Hounslow Heath, where mass 
was openly performed in the general's tent, and where 
priests went among the soldiers persuading them to be- 
come Catholics. For circulating a paper among those 
men advising them to be true to their religion, a Protes- 



JAMES II. 217 

tant clergyman was sentenced to stand three times in the 
pillory, and was actually whipped from Newgate to Ty- 
burn. He dismissed his own brother-in-law from his 
council because he was a Protestant. He handed Ireland 
over to the Earl of Tyrconnel, a worthless, dissolute knave 
who played the same game there for his master, and who 
played the deeper game for himself of one day putting it 
under the protection of the French king. In going to these 
extremities, every man of sense and judgment among the 
Catholics, from the pope to a porter, knew that the king 
was a mere bigoted fool, who would undo himself and the 
cause he sought to advance; but he was deaf to all rea- 
son, and, happily for England ever afterwards, went tum- 
bling off his throne in his own blind way. 

A spirit began to arise in the country which the besot- 
ted plunderer little expected. He first found it out in the 
University of Cambridge. Having made a Catholic a dean 
at Oxford without any opposition, he tried to make a 
monk a master of arts at Cambridge, which attempt the 
University resisted, and defeated him. He then went 
back to his favorite Oxford. On the death of the Presi- 
dent of Magdalen College he commanded that there should 
be elected to succeed him one Anthony Farmer, whose 
only recommendation was that he was of the king's relig- 
ion. The University plucked up courage at last, and 
refused. The dull tyrant, upon this, punished twenty-five 
men by causing them to be expelled and declared incapa- 
ble of holding any church preferment; then he proceeded 
to what he supposed to be his highest step, but to what 
was, in fact, his last plunge head-foremost in his tumble 
off his throne. 

He had issued a declaration that there should be no 
religious tests or penal laws, in order to let in the Catho- 
lics more easily ; but the Protestant dissenters, unmindful 
of themselves, had gallantly joined the regular church in 
opposing it tooth and naiL The king resolved to have 



218 HISTOR Y OF ENGLAND. 

that read in the churches, and to order it to be circulated 
for that purpose by the bishops. The latter took counsel 
with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in disgrace, 
and they resolved that the declaration should not be read, 
and that they would petition the king against it. The 
archbishop himself wrote out the petition, and six bishops 
went into the king's bedchamber the same night to present 
it, to his infinite astonishment. The next Sunday was 
fixed for the reading, and it was only read by two hundred 
out of ten thousand clergymen. The king resolved to 
prosecute the bishops, and they were summoned before 
the Privy Council and committed to the Tower. As the 
six bishops were taken there the people fell upon their 
knees and wept for them, and prayed for them. When 
they got to the Tower, the officers and soldiers on guard 
besought them for their blessing. While they were con- 
fined there, the soldiers every day drank to their release 
with loud shouts. When they were brought up for trial, 
which the attorney-general said was for the high offence of 
censuring the government and giving their opinion about 
affairs of state, they were attended by similar multi- 
tudes, and surrounded by a throng of noblemen and 
gentlemen. When the jury were out to consider their 
verdict, everybody knew that they would rather starve 
than yield to the king's brewer, who was one of them, and 
wanted a verdict for his customer. When they came into 
court the next morning, and gave a verdict of not guilty, 
such a shout rose up in Westminster Hall as it had never 
heard before ; and it was passed on among the people away 
to Temple Bar, and away again to the Tower. It also 
reached the camp at Hounslow, where the fifteen thousand 
soldiers took it up and echoed it. And when the dull king 
heard the mighty roar, asked in alarm what it was, and was 
told that it was " nothing but the acquittal of the bishops," 
he said, in his dogged way, " Call you that nothing ? It is 
so much the worse for them." 




William III., Prince of Orange. 



(219) 



220 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Between the petition and the trial the queen had given 
birth to a son. The entirely new prospect of a Catholic 
successor (for both the king's daughters were Protestants) 
determined a number of the nobles and the Bishop of 
London to invite the Prince of Orange over to England. 
The Royal Mole, seeing his danger at last, made, in his 
fright, many great concessions, besides raising an army of 
forty thousand men ; but the Prince of Orange was not the 
man for James II. to cope with. His preparations were 
extraordinarily vigorous, and his mind was resolved. 

For a fortnight after the prince was ready to sail for 
England, a great wind prevented the departure of his fleet. 
Even when the wind lulled, and it did sail, it was dispersed 
by a storm, and was obliged to put back to refit. At last, 
on November 1, 1688, the Protestant east-wind, as it was 
long called, began to blow, and on the 3d the people of 
Dover and the people of Calais saw a fleet twenty miles 
long sailing gallantly by, between the two places. On the 
5th it anchored at Torbay, in Devonshire, and the prince 
with a splendid retinue of officers and men marched into 
Exeter. But the people in that western part of the country 
had sutfered so much in the Bloody Assize that they had 
lost heart. Few people joined him, and he began to 
think of returning and publishing the invitation he had 
received from those lords as his justification for having 
come at all. At this crisis some of the gentry joined him ; 
the royal army began to falter; an engagement was signed, 
by which all who set their hands to it declared that they 
would support one another in defence of the laws and lib- 
erties of the three kingdoms, of the Protestant religion, 
and of the Prince of Orange. From that time the cause 
received no check ; the greatest towns in England one after 
another declared for the prince, and he knew that it was 
all safe with him when the University of Oxford offered 
to melt down its plate if he wanted any money. 

The young prince was sent to Portsmouth, and there 



JAMES It 221 

was a swift dispersal of all the priests and friars. One 
after another, the king's most important officers and friends 
deserted him and went over to the prince. In the night 
his daughter Anne fled from Whitehall Palace, and the 
Bishop of London, who had once been a soldier, rode be- 
fore her with a drawn sword in his hand and pistols at 
his saddle. "God help me!" cried the miserable king; 
" my very children have forsaken me." In his wildness, 
after debating with such lords as were in London, whether 
he should or should not call a parliament, and after nam- 
ing three of them to negotiate with the prince, he resolved 
to fly to France. He had the little Prince of Wales brought 
back from Portsmouth, and the child and the queen crossed 
the river to Lambeth in an open boat, on a miserable, wet 
night, and got safely away. 

At one o'clock on the morning of December 11 the king 
who had received a letter from the Prince of Orange, stat- 
ing his objects, got out of bed, told Lord Northumberland, 
who lay in his room, not to open the door until the usual 
hour in the morning, went down the back stairs, and 
crossed the river in a small boat, sinking the great seal of 
England by the way. Horses being provided, he rode to 
Feversham, where he embarked in a custom-house vessel. 
The master of this vessel, wanting more ballast, ran into 
the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where the fishermen and 
smugglers crowded about the boat and informed the king 
of their suspicions that he was a "hatchet-faced Jesuit." 
As they took his money, and would not let him go, he told 
them who he was, and that the Prince of Orange wanted 
to take his life; and he began to scream for a boat — and 
and then to cry, because he had lost a piece of wood on 
his ride which he called a fragment of our Saviour's cross. 
He put himself into the hands of the lord lieutenant of 
the county, and his detention was made known to the 
Prince of Orange at Windsor, who, only wanting to get 
rid of him, and not caring where he went so that he went 



222 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

away, was very much disconcerted that they did not let 
him go. However, there was nothing for it hut to have 
him Drought back to Whitehall. And as soon as he got 
there, in his infatuation he heard a mass and set a Jesuit 
to say grace at his public dinner. 

The people had been thrown into the strangest state of 
confusion by his flight, and had taken it into their heads 
that the Irish part of the army were going to murder the 
Protestants. Therefore they set the bells a-ringing, and 
lighted watch-fires, and burned Catholic chapels, and 
looked about for the Jesuits, while the pope's ambassador 
was running away in the dress of a footman. They found 
no Jesuits, but a man who had once been a witness before 
Jeffreys in court saw a swollen, drunken face looking 
through a window down at Wapping, which he well re- 
membered. The face was in a sailor's dress, but he knew 
it to be the face of that accursed judge, and he seized 
him. The people, to their lasting honor, did not tear him 
to pieces. After knocking him about a little they took 
him, in the basest agonies of terror, to the lord mayor, 
who sent him, at his own shrieking jDetition, to the Tower 
for safety. There he died. 

Their bewilderment continuing, the people now made 
rejoicings, as if they had any reason to be glad to have 
the king back again. But his stay was short, and he was 
told that the prince would enter London next day, and 
he had better go to Ham. He said Ham was a cold, damp 
place, and he would rather go to Rochester. He thought 
himself very cunning in this, as he meant to escape from 
Rochester to France. The Prince of Orange and his 
friends knew that perfectly well, and desired nothing 
more. So he went to Gravesend, attended by certain 
lords and watched by Dutch troops, and pitied by the 
generous people, who were far more forgiving than he had 
ever been, when they saw him in his humiliation. On 
the night of December 23, not even then understanding 



JAMES IT. 



223 



that everybody wanted to get rid of him, he went out ab- 
surdly, through his Rochester garden, down to the Med- 
way, and got away to France, where he rejoined the 
queen. 

There had been a council of the lords and the authori- 




Greeting William of Orange. 



ties of London. When the prince came, on the day after 
the king's departure, he summoned the lords to meet 
him, and soon afterwards all those who had served in any 
of the parliaments of King Charles II. It was finally re- 
solved by these authorities that the throne was vacant by 
the conduct of King James II., that it was inconsistent 
with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to 
be governed by a popish prince, that the Prince and 



224 



HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



Princess of Orange should be king and queen during their 
lives and the life of the survivor of them, and that their 
children should succeed them, if they had any. That if 
they had none the Princess Anne and her children should 




Kino- William Thrown from His Horse. 



succeed ; that if she had none the heirs of the Prince of 
Orange should succeed. 

On January 13, 1689, the prince and princess, sitting on 
a throne in Whitehall, bound themselves to these condi- 
tions. The Protestant religion was established in Eng- 
land, and England's great and glorious revolution was 
complete. 




(225) 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

CONCLUSION. 

I have now arrived at the close of my little history. 
The events which succeeded the famous revolution of 
1688 would neither be easily related nor easily understood 
in such a book as this. 

William and Mary reigned together five years. After 
her death William occupied the throne alone for seven 
years longer. During his reign, on September 16, 1701, 
the poor weak creature who had once been James II. of 
England died in France. In the meantime he had done 
his utmost to cause William to be assassinated and to re- 
gain his lost dominions. James's son was declared by the 
French king the rightful King of England, and was called 
in England The Pretender. Some infatuated people in 
England, and particularly in Scotland, took up the Pre- 
tender's cause from time to time, — as if the country had 
not had Stuarts enough ! — and many lives were sacrificed 
and much misery was occasioned. King William died 
on March 7, 1702, of the consequences of an accident 
caused by his horse stumbling with him. He was always a 
brave, patriotic prince, and a man of remarkable abilities. 
His manner was cold and he made but few friends, but 
he had truly loved his queen. When he was dead a lock 
of her hair in a ring was found tied with a black ribbon 
around his left arm. 

He was succeeded by the Princess Anne, a popular 
queen, who reigned twelve years. In her reign the union 
between England and Scotland was effected, and the two 
countries were incorporated under the name of Great 
Britain. Then, from the year 1714 to the year 1830, 
reigned the four Georges. 

It was in the reign of George II., 1745, that the Pre- 
tender did his last mischief and made his last appearance. 
(226 ) 




Victoria. 



(227) 



228 HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Being an old man by that time, he and the Jacobites — as 
his friends were called — put forward his son, Charles Ed- 
ward, known as the Young Pretender. The Highlanders 
of Scotland, an extremely troublesome and wrong-headed 
race on the subject of the Stuarts, espoused his cause, and 
he joined them, and there was a Scottish rebellion to make 
him king, in which many gallant and devoted gentlemen 
lost their lives. It was a hard matter for Charles Edward 
to escape abroad again, with a high price on his head, but 
the Scottish people were extraordinarily faithful to him, 
and after undergoing many romantic adventures he es- 
caped to France. A number of charming stories and de- 
lightful songs arose out of the Jacobite feelings and belong 
to the Jacobite times. Otherwise I think the Stuarts were 
a public nuisance altogether. 

It was in the reign of George III. that England lost 
America by persisting in taxing her without her own con- 
sent. That immense country, made independent under 
Washington, and left to itself, became the United States, 
one of the greatest nations of the earth. In these times 
in which I write it is honorably remarkable for protecting 
its subjects, wherever they may travel, with a dignity and 
a determination which is a model for England. Between 
you and me England has rather lost ground in this respect 
since the days of Oliver Cromwell. 

The union of Great Britain with Ireland — which had 
been getting on very ill by itself — took place in the reign 
of George III , in 1788. 

William IV. succeeded George IV. in the year 1830, 
and reigned seven years. Queen Victoria, his niece, the 
only child of the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George 
III., came to the throne on June 20, 1837. She was mar- 
ried to Prince Albert of Saxe-Gotha on February 10, 1840. 
She is very good and much beloved. So I end, like the 
crier, with 

God Save the Queen ! 



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